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The photo next to Kaydee’s testimonial is of Mabel Pantaleon, a nurse-turned-actress born and raised in New York City. Her biggest success was a bit part on Dexter a few years ago; she’s more recently struggled with bipolar disorder. She keeps a blog. It’s pretty disjointed, unfortunately, but doesn’t mention moving to Canada.

As it happens, there’s a real person whose name is Kaydee Richmond. She works for Tory leader Patrick Brown in Toronto, on the party’s effort to come up with a new set of policies to stand for in the next provincial election, and spoke at the party convention here a few weeks ago. Heck of a coincidence.

And then there’s “Robert & Karen” from Constance Bay. “Many thanks for all the help!” they say, without specifying what the help was. If Robert and Karen live in Constance Bay now, they sent MacLaren a very old photo to go with their testimonial. It was taken in 2009 and the photographer who posted it first said it was of a couple in Manchester.

Guess who else lives in Constance Bay? Robert and Karen McCrimmon. Karen McCrimmon is the Liberal member of Parliament MacLaren dragged up on stage at a fundraiser a couple of weeks ago so he could tell dirty jokes about her.

We’re in danger of getting used to Jack MacLaren’s buffoonery, just as we are used to Cheryl Gallant’s and Donald Trump’s. He seems impervious to shame about advancing nonsensical ideas about how old British constitutional ideas protect land rights, or about being abusive to a female MP. On his own website, now, he presents himself like a set of revolutionary kitchen shears or a real-estate investment scheme that Lisa from Nebraska says is making her $5,400 a week for just eight hours of work.

If he doesn’t feel any shame about his shtick, the people who keep electing him should.

After this story appeared online Tuesday evening, a disclaimer was added to MacLaren’s website. “In order to maintain the privacy of constituents, stock photos and generic names have been used,” it said.

dreevely@postmedia.com

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