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Picked up some of Winnipeg’s best to keep us going through another full day of Cabinet meetings. Thanks for the fuel, @OhDoughnuts. #shoplocal pic.twitter.com/9vrgWnUdxo — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 20, 2020

This is more true than she seems to know. Because Donutgate’s inventors are all based in southern or eastern Ontario, Tim’s was acclaimed without discussion as the mass-market donut not chosen. But the traditional choice in Winnipeg would have been Robin’s, which once asserted total donut dominance over Northern Ontario and points west. Thunder Bay-born Robin’s, unlike Tim’s, is still Canadian owned. And it could use the help.

“Other outlets use screens to advertise their latest products while adapting and expanding their menus to reflect the latest … trends,” Andrew Braga wrote in the Winnipeg Free Press in 2015, noting the closure of yet another Robin’s location. “Robin’s is still hawking more or less the same products it has been for years.”

Gosh, you mean, like … coffee and donuts? No poutine, meatless burgers, Belgian waffle breakfast sandwiches, French toast breakfast sandwiches, chicken nuggets, potato wedges, “coffee you can eat,” “artisan-style” grilled cheese sandwiches, “omelette bites,” muffins with goo inside or any of the other mostly pre-fabricated and rethermed grotesqueries Tim Hortons has been flogging in recent years?

If Trudeau was going to go slumming for donuts in the Peg, surely there was only one real choice.

Photo by Pat McGrath/Postmedia/File

Donutgate fit with another narrative as well: The idea that Canadians are cheapskates. Not to single out my National Post colleague Matt Gurney, but away we go: On Twitter, he used the Donutgate non-phenomenon to support a previous column in which he argued Canadians should be happy to pay the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s security expenses. His complaints about Canadians’ alleged cheapness were wide-ranging: “Political careers have been derailed by breakfast tabs. The prime minister’s official residence was allowed to become literally uninhabitable because government after government feared the political backlash of spending any money on it,” Gurney fumed. “The Air Force’s fleet of VIP transport jets are headed in the same direction, largely for the same reason.”