Climate change facts become matter of belief at election time
The People’s Party of Canada is really big on freedom of expression.
A whole section of its platform, laid out over the party website, is devoted to the rights of people to say whatever the heck they want.
“What some people find politically incorrect, offensive or even hateful cannot serve as the legal basis for discrimination and censorship,” the People’s Party asserts.
So it would be the height of irony — ridiculous irony, in fact — if Maxime Bernier and his People’s Party end up restricting the rights of Canadians to say that climate change is real during the upcoming election campaign.
Despite the People’s Party’s claims about the current danger to freedom of expression here, Canada actually has a pretty good record at tolerating out-ofthe-box thinking in political debate.
For several years in the 1990s, the official Opposition in the House of Commons was led by the Bloc Québécois, a party dedicated to breaking up Canada. That’s how we roll here — you don’t even have to believe in the future of the country to sit in its legislature.
Beliefs, however, aren’t the same as facts. That distinction is going to be important, if not crucial in this fall’s campaign — on climate change, but also on potentially hot topics such as immigration or refugee policy.
Thanks to Elections Canada and a warning it recently delivered to environmental activists, we’re seeing just how shaky the ground may get between facts and beliefs when the official campaign gets under way in a few weeks.
Ghislain Desjardins, a spokesperson for Elections Canada, confirmed in an interview with me on Monday that, yes, environmental groups were warned in a recent webinar that what they see as a fact — climate change — could become seen as a matter of mere belief in the heat of an election campaign. That’s a real possibility, since Bernier has used social media to muse along those lines in the past.
Elections Canada stresses that no one is gagging the environmentalists from stating the facts on climate change before or during the campaign. But if the existence of climate change becomes an election issue, some charities will have to be very careful about what they say in any advertising. Otherwise, they may be forced to register as “third parties” in the campaign, which could put their charitable status at risk.
Here’s part of the clarification Elections Canada put out on Monday: “A third party can do anything they were doing before the pre-election and election periods. But if they spend $500 or more on certain activities, they need to register with Elections Canada. Third parties need to register if they are paying for activities or ads that specifically identify a candidate or party.”
Elections Canada was stressing that this entire scenario still just exists in the world of the hypothetical. No one knows whether we’re going to have an actual election debate over whether climate change is real and, if so, how a third party’s “issue ad” could potentially be troublesome when it comes to the law.
Still, many outraged politicos were using the analogy to smoking to speak out against Elections Canada and what looks to be overzealous, advance caution.
“Suppose a politician decided smoking is good for you, would doctors have to register as third parties in an election to stress (the) importance of kicking the habit?” Green party Leader Elizabeth May asked on Twitter.
Pick a touchier topic, though. Over the weekend, as the Star’s Alex Boutilier reported, a People’s Party of Canada gathering included discussion of “Political Islam” as a threat in Canada. What if someone in the Islamic community disagrees? Who’s turned this into a partisan issue?
In journalism, this has been framed as the discussion around false equivalence — the idea that being fair means presenting both sides of an issue, no matter how ridiculous one side may be. One person says climate change is real, one says it’s not — there, my job’s done, people can decide for themselves.
I did ask Elections Canada on Monday whether national unity could also become a partisan hot potato in the eyes of the law in this election campaign — whether it could become contentious for a third party to proclaim they believed in a united Canada if a political party (say the Bloc Québécois) was saying it didn’t. Possibly, was the answer. But just as is the case with climate change, it would depend on how much controversy the issue was generating and whether the third party paid for an ad.
This, then, seems to be dubious magic of election campaigns and their potential, in the heat of debate, to turn facts into mere beliefs — even the facts in front of your nose.
Perhaps when it comes to climate change in the coming campaign, then, citizens would be wiser to ignore the prospect of the election law’s false equivalence and follow some oldfashioned advice to journalists that’s widely attributed to former Sheffield University professor Jonathan Foster:
“If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the (expletive deleted) window and find out which is true.”