The political world can be complicated and distinguishing true from false is not always easy, said Marland, who teaches at Acadia University.

Yes, exactly. You’d pretty much need a referee, and then how can you be sure that that person isn’t the one fibbing for personal gain?

In a health democracy, it seems like politicians avoid saying things that are demonstrably false on their own. Tortured and spun to the point of uselessness, sure, but never directly counterfactual. Take Poilievre’s “Carney has made pipelines illegal”, for example. Useless (since nobody wants to build one anyway) and basically untrue, but you could make up a hypothetical pipeline that would be illegal, and Carney does have a lot of say over the regulations, so by the letter…

The alternative facts seem to start only once you have a burgeoning radical faction there to support them in the first place.