Treading the same cynical path
Liberals copy worst qualities of predecessors
Is it inevitable that every government becomes what it once despised — a matter of the realities of power overtaking the dreams of opposition? Or do their broken promises, ethical lapses and abuses of power remain, in the end, choices, for which they can be held to account? Do governments turn to seed, or were they that way before they took office? Or is the problem not of any particular party at any particular time, but of a larger culture of cynicism and deceit, in which all parties share?
I do not know the answers to these questions. I only see the same pattern repeated in every government over the last several decades. The Mulroney government came to power promising to clean up the sodden mess left by the Trudeau Liberals (“you had an option, sir — you could have said no!”), only to indulge in its own orgy of patronage appointments and dubious ethics.
The Chrétien Liberals were elected to clean up the mess left by the Mulroney Conservatives. Instead they ramped up a massive kickback scheme overseen by a parallel government of party officials and Liberal-friendly advertising executives — to say nothing of their shameless pork-barrelling, habitual disdain for Parliament or the prime minister’s personal portfolio of shame.
The Harper government ran and won on a promise to break this pattern, even including the passage of a Federal Accountability Act among their “five priorities.” In power, they invented whole new ways to evade accountability and step on Parliament, while going back on nearly every principle they had ever held or promise they had ever made. Unsurprisingly, compromises on principle ended up begetting compromises on ethics, if only because, in the blur, people forgot which was which.
And now the Trudeau Liberals, again, dynastic succession being the surest sign of the democratic health of a polity. But then, Trudeau fils went to unusual lengths to stress how different he was, not only from his father but from pretty much every leader who went before.
It wasn’t just the dreamy rhetoric, or the upbeat slogans (“better is always possible”) or the youthful idealists he recruited as candidates, or his own personal appeal — the dewy good looks, untouched it seemed by hard living; the sense that, as a kind of royalty, he was above the grubby dealings of politics.
No, it was also that platform, with its bold declarations and hundreds of promises, many of them unprecedented, on everything from electoral reform to legalizing marijuana, all laid out in black and white in a way that left no room for equivocation. Could anyone doubt this signalled something new, a break with the past, a government quite unlike the others?
And yet it is not. If the turn was not quite as remorseless, or as sudden, as under Harper — who on his
first day in power appointed his campaign co-chair, Michael Fortier, both to the Senate and to cabinet, having earlier promised to appoint no unelected person to either, also appointing to cabinet David Emerson, who days earlier had campaigned as a Liberal — it has nevertheless been striking in its completeness.
The promises were the first to go. The promise to run deficits of less than $10 billion was revoked within weeks of taking power. The promise of electoral reform took a little longer, the government having first to go through the motions of consulting the country before concluding that, as the prime minister’s preferred reform option was not the country’s, no reform was possible.
More telling has been the government’s reversion to the mean on matters of democratic process, where what was required was, not to do things that no government had ever done before, but merely to refrain from doing things that every government had done before. Question period is the same insufferable series of nonanswers, or answers to questions that were not asked, as it ever was.
The Information Commissioner, in her last report, found that, notwithstanding Liberal promises of an “open by default” government, access to information had, if anything, worsened.
The same tightening previously imposed on the party — the “open nominations” that were replaced by leadership appointees and protection for incumbents, the “free votes” that were replaced by whipped votes even on matters of conscience like abortion — has increasingly been applied to Parliament at large: witness the government’s two attempts, both rebuffed, to set broad rules limiting time for debate in the House, without the tiresome necessity of limiting debate one bill at a time.
Or consider the omnibus budget bill introduced last week. At 556 pages, it is not as long as the longest of the Harper government’s infamous omnibus bills, but it is longer than most. Yet the party was quite clear in its election platform that it would “bring an end to this undemocratic practice.”
To be sure, among the package of parliamentary changes introduced last year was a measure empowering the Speaker to order an omnibus bill to be split, if he considered its purposes too disparate: it must be clear when Parliament votes just what MPs are assenting to. But an exception was made for budget bills — perhaps reasonably, so long as the bills they contain are all clearly connected to implementing the budget. Yet, notwithstanding this provision, the Liberals attempted to smuggle into last year’s budget bill matters that were plainly not budget-related, as the Speaker was belatedly forced to rule. We shall see whether the current exercise meets the same fate.
This government is an odd mix: obtusely fanatical, on matters of concern to its activists; blithely carefree, where the issue is more to do with the ethical or democratic standards others expect of it.
But it would be hard to call it new. Once, it was at pains to differentiate itself from its predecessors. Now it seems equally determined to ape their worst qualities.