Ontario Premier Doug Ford exchanges words with NDP Leader Andrea Horwath during question period at Queen's Park in Toronto, in July 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

TORONTO — By calling “fake news” on verifiable facts, experts say Premier Doug Ford’s government is bringing Donald Trump’s tactics north of the border.

Ford and his social services minister, Lisa MacLeod, have both rejected the fact that their government broke its promise when it decided to cut short the basic income pilot project started by the Liberals.

The Progressive Conservatives’ promise to keep the pilot project going was reported widely in national outlets like the CBC, TVO and the Toronto Star, as well as in local newspapers like Kawartha Lakes This Week.

Despite that, Ford told reporters last week his party had only promised to review the pilot. “We’re going to agree to disagree on that. You know we said we’d be reviewing it,” Ford said in Picton, Ont.

The week before MacLeod used the phrase popularized by Trump to dismiss the fact that the party broke its promise to keep the pilot project.

“We did not break a promise. That fake news that was in the news today totally mischaracterizes what we’re doing,” she told the legislature.

Tim Abray, a PhD candidate in political science at Queen’s University, said the Ford government’s handling of the broken promise undermines the media, which takes a “direct sledgehammer into the foundation of democracy.”

Pointing out that countries like the United Kingdom and United States only recognize modern democracies that have a free press, Abray said the government should consider “whether winning is worth the price of undermining confidence in the institutions that help keep democracy healthy.”

“It certainly brings Trumpian tactics to Canada and I think that’s a problem,” he said.

It’s “adopting the sorts of tactics that we’re seeing in the United States, this idea of stigmatizing the role of the media, this idea of just flat out denying something that’s a fact. Let’s call it what it is, that’s just lying.”

By making up facts Abray, who was a press secretary in former premier Mike Harris’ government, said you can’t have productive political debate.

For example, he said you can’t disagree on whether gravity exists and at the same time have a “meaningful discussion” about how to stop people from falling off the edge of a cliff.

Huron University College political science professor Paul Nesbitt-Larking said the Tories have some “wiggle room” about their broken promise to keep the basic income pilot because it wasn’t in their platform. But he said by calling “fake news” the government is playing wedge politics.

“To use the expression ‘fake news’ is to carry with it the inference that the mainstream media are the enemy,” he said. “It’s a way of establishing and enforcing an ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

Whether consciously using the term or not, Nesbitt-Larking said it weaponizes a group against another group. For example he said when Trump talks about “fake news” he singles out reporters as the “perpetrators” and they “therefore become the enemy.”

He called that or any other attempt to erode public trust in the media “dangerous.”

Governments across party lines try to blunt the impact of a broken election promise because they can do damage to trust in the government. But Lori Turnbull, the incoming director at the Dalhousie University School of Public Administration, said she can’t recall another government outright rejecting the fact that they broke a promise.

She pointed to recent examples like the Trudeau government breaking its promise for electoral reform and former finance minister Jim Flaherty’s broken promise to change the rules around income trusts where the governments tried to justify their broken promise rather than denying it happened.

“It seems to me that they’re doing what Trump is doing in that he makes up the fake news and then says the real news is fake,” Turnbull said.

She said Ford and MacLeod’s denial of the facts on the basic income pilot show that they “don’t want to be held to account.”

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