History records that when Alexis de Tocqueville researched his classic 1835 study, Democracy in America, he also made a side trip to Upper Canada.

He never wrote a postscript on what would one day become Ontario. So herewith, a word on how our own provincial politics are being influenced by democracy in America today.

There is nothing close to Donald Trump at Queen’s Park — not the bigotry, racism, misogyny or coarseness. But his talent for truthiness has spread beyond America’s borders, and is making a side trip to Ontario.

The president-elect well understands what de Tocqueville might describe as the essence of democracy today: Choosing the lesser of two evils.

While Trump may have seemed the devil incarnate to some, he proved devilishly clever at out-demonizing his opponent — by delegitimizing and criminalizing her. Making her more evil.

Like any populist, he excelled at pressing people’s buttons — an electorate eager to lap up his conspiracy theories, but also a media ready to act as an echo chamber until it was too late; and a police force playing into his hands.

Who needs attack ads when you can merely harness an unwitting police as your attack dog, and an uncritical media as your lap dog? By the time journalists woke up to their duty to fact-check — and context-check — they had already done Trumps’ bidding.

Why is Ontario vulnerable to Trump’s truthiness?

Let’s look at how a Progressive Conservative candidate is casting the premier as a criminal, akin to Hillary Clinton, in a coming byelection.

“My name is André Marin. I’m your Ontario PC candidate in Ottawa-Vanier. But you might know me as a former Ontario ombudsman . . . and that is exactly why I had to take a stand against Kathleen Wynne,” he writes in an email appeal for money sent last Tuesday — voting day in America.

“I’m an anti-corruption and ethics expert and this is one of the most unscrupulous and unethical governments in Ontario’s history. It’s one of the worst cases I’ve seen in my career.”

Let’s ponder that historical reference for a moment. What is Wynne charged with that supposedly surpasses the span of history since the time of de Tocqueville’s visit to Upper Canada?

In fact, there are no criminal charges against the premier or her team. There are no charges of any kind against Wynne, her cabinet or Liberal MPPs.

What, then, can Marin mean? The star PC candidate is referring to recent charges under the Elections Act — provincial offences, not criminal — alleging bribery by Wynne’s former deputy chief of staff, Pat Sorbara, in another byelection nearly two years ago.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the OPP have overreached, but as a lawyer Marin has the benefit of legal training stressing that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. You know, like former treasurer Greg Sorbara, who was wrongly named in a search warrant by the RCMP; or then-finance minister Ralph Goodale whom the RCMP probed at the behest of the NDP ahead of the 2006 federal election. Both were later exonerated — and the RCMP excoriated (not unlike the FBI’s ill-timed intervention in the US election).

Ontario’s NDP, taking a page from their federal cousins, demanded the probe that led the OPP to lay charges against Pat Sorbara. Our independent courts will have the final say on this case, but the independence of the office of the ombudsman has been diminished by Marin’s reckless partisanship so soon after leaving his job last year.

Until MPPs from all parties refused to renew his term, Marin served as a supposedly non-partisan officer of the legislature. Impartiality was part of the job description, yet Marin started trolling and taunting the Liberals on Twitter, filed lawsuits against both the government and the legislature, and now seeks revenge by running in the upcoming byelection.

Marin is merely the tip of the Tory spear. PC leader Patrick Brown and his caucus have seized on the so-called corruption narrative as the path of least resistance, but it may prove to be a dead end, and possibly self-defeating.

Whenever Brown plays the bribery card, the media may well point out that his PCs gave MPP Garfield Dunlop a job at party headquarters immediately after he relinquished elected office so that the leader could run in his riding in a byelection last year. Bribery, or business as usual?

And whenever NDP Leader Andrea Horwath talks darkly about criminality — as she did in her failed 2014 campaign, at the expense of privatization concerns — the media may remind voters of how she quietly dissuaded star MPP Jagmeet Singh from seeking federal office last year by appointing him deputy leader. An elegant NDP inducement?

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It’s not that Brown and Horwath are guilty of bribery — merely hypocrisy. Crooked Kathleen, we give you Crooked Patrick and Crooked Andrea.

When the dust (and dirt) settles, Ontarians may wonder why the opposition parties didn’t spend more time on the issues people worry about: energy costs, climate change, health care and privatization. For that, we can thank democracy in America, which has spread, all these years later, to Ontario.

Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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