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He contacted the Progressive Conservatives and said he wanted in. Leader Patrick Brown welcomed him with open arms.

“There’s a saying in Ottawa-Vanier that all you need to get elected is to be a donkey with a red bowtie. I think those days are over. The riding has been Liberal since 1971, which is the year the Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup, the year Pierre Trudeau married Margaret Trudeau. It’s been way too long. The people of Ottawa-Vanier have been taken for granted,” Marin said.

(The Leafs last won the Stanley Cup in 1967. Though that was the year Tory Jules Morin last won the seat for the Progressive Conservatives. He held it till 1971.)

Marin’s career includes stints as a Crown prosecutor, director of Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit that examines serious injuries and deaths involving police, and the federal military ombudsman. Marin now teaches part-time in the University of Ottawa’s law faculty and writes a column for the Ottawa and Toronto Suns. He’s a father of six children.

As Ontario’s ombudsman, he denounced government carelessness and malfeasance, issuing reports with eye-catching visuals — he commissioned an artist to draw Hydro One as a pig gorged on money with plugs for trotters for a report on the utility’s billing practices – and giving take-no-prisoners news conferences. He issued fiery reports on prisoner abuse in Ontario’s jails, on crowd-control tactics during mass protests, on slack oversight of home daycares.

“I was always a champion for the little guy,” he said.

He was also a self-promoter who campaigned openly for more powers, and billed hundreds of thousands in expenses related to living in Ottawa while working in Toronto. When his last term was due to expire a year ago last May, he organized a Twitter protest demanding that he be reappointed.

He got a short extension, just long enough for the government to settle on a different successor: former federal taxpayers’ ombudsman Paul Dubé. Dubé is much lower-key and believes a less confrontational attitude than Marin’s gets better results. In a late-evening Twitter venting just the other day, Marin called him a doormat, Marie Antoinette and a village idiot.