COYNE ON DEAD PARROTS AND LIBERAL PROMISES.
Liberals bring focus to their broken promises
On the websites of some online retailers these days you will come across a quite extraordinary sight. Below the picture of the shirt or floor lamp or whatever item is for sale, there is often a space for customers to leave reviews or comments. And the comments, remarkably, are not always complimentary. “I hadn’t worn this shirt more than once before one of the buttons fell off.” “It seems like you’re using cheaper, thinner cotton than you used to.” And so on.
I say extraordinary and remarkable, but of course it’s quite ordinary and unremarkable: of course the odd button is going to fall off, and of course not everyone is going to be satisfied with everything. What’s remarkable is a company allowing these things to be published on its own site. Advertising and marketing are traditionally devoted to the maintenance of a universe hermetically sealed against any hint of imperfection: nothing goes wrong, no ugly people appear and everyone is happy all the time. It is an essentially totalitarian exercise: literally, in the communications strategies of dictatorships, but only slightly less so in a Coke commercial.
And yet here we are, on a site whose sole purpose is hawking the company’s wares, and a ghastly spot of reality has been permitted to intrude. I imagine there were long, nervous meetings about this, until some VP swallowed hard and said, “let’s do it.”
I say all this as a reminder of how ingrained the habits and conventions of salesmanship are in us, whether as sellers or buyers. We are so accustomed to it that it takes an effort of will to break out of it, or even to notice it. Indeed, that word — salesmanship — is itself a euphemism. Of course I meant lying.
Which brings me to the federal Liberals’ latest exercise in transparency and accountability, the already notorious “Mandate Letter Tracker.” Barely a day after launch the project, ostensibly designed to report to the public on which items on the government’s agenda have been achieved and which have not, has all but disappeared under the mountains of ridicule heaped upon it.
The inherent conflict in a government grading itself has been amply noted, as has the bit of trickery sewn into its design: rather than check the government’s record against the promises on which it was elected, the site tracks the “commitments” contained in the mandate letters the prime minister sent to each minister on appointment to cabinet. Rather than “help Canadians hold the government accountable,” as it claims, the tracker at best holds ministers accountable to the prime minister — appropriately enough, since the whole thing was cooked up by the PMO and tailored to its specifications.
As might have been predicted, the government holds itself to a notably forgiving standard. Where the independent tracking website Trudeau Meter lists 36 of 226 promises as having been “broken,” the government consigns just three out of 364 “commitments” to that status. Except it cannot bring itself to say the word “broken,” any more than it can say “promise.”
Instead, it declares only that these are “not being pursued.” Another 13 pledges are said to be “under way — with challenges” ( as distinct from “under way — on track”). Just how much of a euphemism “under way with challenges” is can be seen in some of the items to which it is attached. Example: the promise to “balance the budget in 2019- 20” is in no sense under way. It is under water. It is challenged only in the sense that the government is doing its level best to avoid it. Like the parrot, the promise has expired. It has ceased to be.
Of course, such judgments are inevitably subjective, at least to some degree — who’s to say a promise that has not been kept to date might not be in time? — as is the question of whether the overall score is to the government’s credit or discredit. The government has by its own reckoning “completed — fully met” 66 of its promises ( 59, by Trudeau Meter’s count). So: is the glass four- fifths empty, or one- fifth full?
It is the language I find so fascinating. They had a choice, after all. They could have said the promise to reform the electoral system was “broken,” not unpursued, as it was open to them to say the promised “open and transparent competition to replace the CF- 18 fighter aircraft” is kaput, not challenged. Did they think no one would notice? Do they take the public for children? “Electoral reform has just gone to a farm, where it plays all day long with the other commitments that are not being pursued.”
It’s possible, again, that there were long meetings about this. We know that this government, like most modern governments, obsesses over exactly these sorts of details: see the lengthy email chain agonizing over whether the kid on the budget cover should be wearing glasses or not. But it’s equally possible that it didn’t even occur to them. The tendency to euphemism is everywhere, but in politics and government it is so habitual that it is as if they were speaking another language, not so much English as euphemish.
Of course, it’s especially galling to see such opacity being deployed in what is supposedly an example of the government’s commitment to transparency. But transparency, gloriously, may nevertheless be the result. In one clueless swoop, the Liberals have managed to call attention not only to all the promises they have broken, but to their comical inability to admit what is plain for all to see. Pining for the fjords, innit?