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When Kathleen Wynne first announced plans to hike Ontario’s minimum wage to $15-an-hour, she argued the increase was necessary to create “fair workplaces and better jobs.”

“Millions of workers in Ontario are finding it almost impossible to support their families on a minimum wage that just doesn’t go far enough,” Wynne said while premier in a May 2017 release.

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However, in the post-truth world of 21st century politics, there’s increasingly more political payoff in feeding voters misleading, exaggerated or outright false appeals to emotion than there is in dishing out unpalatable truths.

In Ontario, it was clearly politically profitable ahead of an election campaign for Wynne to champion millions of low-wage workers struggling to make ends meet, and paint Doug Ford –- then her chief rival –- as an enemy of the working poor.

And when Ford eventually proposed to freeze the minimum wage at $14-an-hour and eliminate provincial income tax for minimum wage earners, that gave Wynne her populist bumper sticker.

“Doug Ford says he stands for workers, but opposes Kathleen Wynne’s plan to give them a raise,” she tweeted in May. “Actions speak louder than words, and we’ve acted: we raised the minimum wage to $14 and will raise it again to $15.”