For want of a good speech
The state of Canadian political speeches is so bland that, when Justin Trudeau found a way to talk about “a uniquely Canadian idea of freedom” in Toronto this past March, onlookers would have been forgiven for toppling from their chairs in surprise.
It is not as though Trudeau’s argument in the speech was overwhelmingly brilliant or that his account of history was flawless. But his words were compelling to read and hear; almost uniquely in recent memory, a political leader had stood in front of an audience and developed an idea.
But how did expectations fall so low? How have good speeches become so scarce?
If one were to look for the primary perpetrator of recent oratorical vandalism in this country, Prime Minister Stephen Harper would deserve the cuffing. As journalist Paul Wells documents, “Harper doesn’t spend his afternoons trying to find potent expression for his ideas. He works at removing memorable turns of phrase and identifiable ideas from his speeches. He puts great effort into flattening the prose.”
According to Wells’ sources close to the prime minister, this stripping away of meaning is meant to keep Harper from being caught in contradiction with his own remarks. His speeches also give media little choice in what they will report; drowning readers in platitudes and vacuousness. Harper and his team determine which of his words end up in the papers.
And the Prime Minister has also wrought a comparable intellectual hollowing in the communications of his cabinet and backbenchers. Amongst Stephen Harper’s political spawn, those who have been rewarded and promoted for partisan service, we find the likes of Pierre Poilievre and Paul Calandra — chief obfuscator and nonsense purveyor of this government, respectively.
To be fair, there’s plenty of blame to go around for the state of Canadian speechmaking. As former Ontario premier Bob Rae has been saying for years, there’s been a general levelling down of dialogue in the House of Commons and increasing loyalty in all media to nebulous and halftruth talking points.
In this world, coherence takes a back seat to scoring points and lodging bite-sized messages in minds of casual onlookers. As writer Joseph Heath wrote, the “objective is to push people’s buttons, to appeal to their hearts, not their heads.” Tune into CBC’s The House for example, Canada’s most listened to political program, to witness a weekly procession of political deputies taking turns broadcasting unbalanced rhetoric and fragmentary non-answers.
In a lot of cases, journalists let politicians get away with the scripted shenanigans, reinforcing the behaviour. Or worse, a slight slip of the tongue or attempt to speak extemporaneously earns politicians bruises from commentators far more lasting than what they deserve.
But the grim state of oratory in this country today is noth- ing new and nothing unique to Canada. Although we might be tempted to look back longingly at the sparkling words of a Martin Luther King or the eloquent moralizing of JFK, we ought to remember that most speeches in history were of more functional, vapid or lowly sorts, not remembered because they did not deserve to be recorded or reproduced.
Renowned American journalist H. L. Mencken, writing of the deplorable inaugural address of President Harding in 1921, said this of the most important speech of that year: “it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimetres. Such imbeciles do not want ideas ... What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures.”
Mencken’s venom was reserved not just for citizens who tolerate such “rumble and bumble,” but also for the politicians and speechwriters who cater to these audiences, who set this garbage prose down on paper: “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotic- ally through endless nights,” he says.
But what does all this indicate about the Canadian political speeches that we’ll be hearing in the coming months, as we trudge towards an October election? Not that they will inevitably be bad, but that they likely will be.
That won’t change until both of the villains in Mencken’s story reform themselves. Citizens need to demand more than the “sonorous nonsense” currently on offer, asserting themselves at political conventions, town hall debates and in their communications with politicians to demand more substance and greater coherence. Politicians, meanwhile, have to find it in themselves to venture out of the sad darkness of saying nothing, out into the sunshine of — at the very least and from time to time — developing an idea.