Liberals fooled by their own image
‘I THINK IN ALL LIKELIHOOD (TRUDEAU) POSES NO DANGER TO ANYONE BUT THE ECONOMY. ’ — ANDREW COYNE
If you missed it — perhaps you were shovelling the walk, or in the bath — the latest Liberal broken promise has arrived. This time the issue is the F- 35 fighter jet. You may recall the Liberal vow during the last election campaign to scrap the previous government’s controversial purchase, and start the process of finding a replacement for our aging CF-18s all over again.
Not only would the contract be put out to competitive tender, but the F- 35 would be excluded from consideration — an important point of distinction with both the Conservatives, who seemed inclined to stick with the F- 35, and the NDP, who favoured an open bidding process.
At any rate, that’s if you take the party platform at face value. Perhaps there is more than one way to interpret “we will not buy the F-35 stealth fighter- bomber.” A campaigning Justin Trudeau went so far as to claim this would save “tens of billions of dollars,” which is the amount you’d save if you didn’t buy any planes at all.
But here we are f our months later and the Defence Minister has a somewhat different message. Asked at a defence conference this week if the F- 35 were still off the table, Harjit Sajjan would say only that the process would be “open.” The important thing, he said, was to “build the right requirements for Canada and then we’ll see how that plays out in terms of which companies want to come forward.”
So add that to the list, along with the $ 10- billion deficits for two years, the balanced budget after four, the 25,000 refugees, the revenue neutral tax changes and the rest. I repeat, it has been just four months since the election.
Some might detect a pattern of deception in this. But the more one watches this government at work, the more one must be open to an alternative explanation for its behaviour. Psychologists call it “cognitive dissonance,” a condition in which the sub- ject, unable to reconcile his own understanding of reality with the facts, retreats into the preferred reality rather than endure the acute discomfort to which he would otherwise be exposed. In a fully dissociative state, the subject becomes more or less completely disconnected from reality.
This is more common than it might seem. Even after nine years in power, the government of Stephen Harper remained convinced it was still in opposition. Conservative ministers would rise in the Commons to denounce this policy or that practice of government, to all appearances wholly unaware they were members of it.
Or consider the fascinating case known to researchers of a 68-year-old woman, let’s call her HRC. Asked by an interviewer on national television whether she had ever lied to the American people, she replied “I don’t believe I ever have,” as if it were possible to be in doubt whether you had deliberately told a falsehood. Asked if she had always told the truth, her reply was equally evasive: “I’ve always tried to.”
It is not that the dissociative personality says things he knows to be false or does things he knows to be in violation of his prior commitments. Rather, where there is a conflict between self-perception and reality, his subconscious simply substitutes the one for the other. HRC has an image of herself as an honest person. Presented with evidence she had not been, she could only incorporate it into her pre-existing image of herself. If she had lied, it was something she could not help.
I would not go so far as the distinguished therapist Evan Solomon, who in a recent issue of the Maclean’s Journal of Medicine diagnosed Justin Trudeau as a kind of psychopath, alternately charming (“the romantic”) and homicidal (“the killer”). I think in all likelihood he poses no danger to anyone but the economy. Still, a number of recent incidents give one pause.
There is, for example, the matter of the Saudi arms contract. It is logically possible to be in favour of selling $15-billion worth of armoured vehi- cles to one of the world’s most repressive regimes — that would describe the Conservative position — as it is also possible to be against it, as the Liberals seemed to be in opposition.
The party’s current position, on the other hand, as described by the Global Affairs Minister, Stephane Dion, is that it doesn’t approve of the contract it is in the process of implementing.
The reality is the contract could not proceed if the government were to find it in violation of Canada’s export rules — that is to say, by applying them — against supplying arms to countries with a “persistent record of serious violations” of human rights. But to let it go ahead anyway would offend against the Liberals’ self-image as peaceloving humanitarians. So it must be that, in the words of a former prime minster, they had no option.
Or consider this week’s vote in Parliament on a Conservative resolution condemning the “boycott, divest, sanctions” (BDS) campaigns against Israel being carried out by various churches and activist organizations. Here again the Liberals were clear in their opposition to the motion, which they rejected as overly sweeping, given the many disparate groups with disparate motives who are involved. And here again they voted for it. (“Liberals denounce and agree with Tory motion” was one headline.) It is one thing to say one thing and do another, in sequence. But to do both at the same time is deeply worrying.
Further examples are easily called to mind. Sending troops to fight in a “non-combat” role against ISIL. Signing the Trans Pacific Partnership international trade agreement, while disavowing any commitment to ratifying it. It is of great comfort, in the circumstances, to learn that the Liberals have been consulting an expert in “deliv-erology.” For this is a government that is plainly in need of professional help.