Dear politicians, please stop lying
The Donald Trump era in the United States has knocked mainstream media outlets away from their traditional claims to reportorial neutrality, just as the Rob Ford era did in Toronto: If the man in question utters a demonstrable falsehood, it will be labelled as such. Trump supporters demand to know why media outlets didn’t do the same with his predecessors, just as Ford supporters did. And Trump supporters have as fair a point there as Ford supporters did.
It’s tough to look back and justify years of having countered demonstrable falsehoods from politicians ( or anyone else) only with alternative statements — however questionable they might themselves have been. Trump’s falsehoods might come thicker and faster and more brazenly than their predecessors, just like Ford’s. But none is falser than we’ve encountered before or encounter routinely today.
To wit: iPolitics reported Monday t hat Conservative leadership candidates Steven Blaney and Andrew Scheer are claiming in fundraising material that Justin Trudeau’s government intends to legalize or decriminalize, respectively, all drugs — including heroin. ( This is not actually a crazy idea, but I suppose Blaney and Scheer aren’t after my vote.) Their evidence is that a backbench Liberal MP, Nathaniel Erskine- Smith, thinks this would be a good idea and wrote an op- ed for Vice saying as much — which is to say, they have no evidence at all. It’s bullcrap. It’s not even spin; it’s just Trump-brand fantasy, like murders are “terribly increasing” in Philadelphia (they’re not) or “that was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period” (it wasn’t).
You wouldn’t let your sixyear- old kid get away with this stuff. But in Canadian politics, it’s pretty routine: Conservative mailouts in the past election campaign said Trudeau wanted marijuana sold in “corner stores.” (Again, not a crazy idea, but he had not said that.) In a leaders’ debate in September 2015, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair claimed that family reunification-class immigration had been “completely shut down under ( Stephen) Harper’s Conservatives.” (One-quarter of all new permanent residents in 2015 were sponsored family members.) Trudeau once claimed Conserva- tive legislation “would allow handguns and assault weapons to be … left (in cars) parked outside a Canadian Tire or local hockey arena.” (It retained a requirement that restricted weapons be transported directly between specifically authorized locations.) That’s all just recently.
I don’t intend to compare the falseness of these false statements. Debate amongst yourselves when garden-variety exaggeration becomes a lie. And we aren’t necessarily talking about lies anyway — often people are just wrong. What matters is whether they try to be right. Once demonstrable falsehoods constitute a significant chunk of political discourse, it becomes vulnerable to someone like Ford or Trump, who simply has no regard for the truth in the first place and so won’t make the slightest effort to speak it.
Why would your average voter necessarily care? It’s difficult to argue Canadian politicians as a class deserve any more trust than they’re currently afforded. Toronto Mayor John Tory was previously against road tolls; now he’s for road tolls. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was previously for road tolls; now she’s against them, but nevertheless told Tory she would allow him to toll two city- owned highways. Then, because it was annoying her caucus, she reneged. All that only took a couple of years.
Tot up Canadian political parties’ egregious records of broken promises — Pierre Trudeau on price controls, Jean Chrétien on the GST, Stephen Harper on income trusts, Justin Trudeau on electoral reform, Dalton McGuinty’s no- tax- hike pledge, Philippe Couillard’s $ 7 daycare freeze, Gordon Campbell’s HST debacle — and it’s reasonable for the average voter to conclude there’s not much predictive value at all in what comes out of any politician’s mouth.
Nothing good comes from that. Voters reasonably resort to apathy, or to naked self-interest. Those inclined to partisanship excuse hypocrisy, idiocy and broken promises from politicians on their side by revelling in the hypocrisy, idiocy and broken promises of politicians and their supporters on the other side. New unholy alliances form out of nowhere: 9/ 11 truthers and conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones used to be among partisan conservatives’ most l oathed creatures. Some number of them, anyway, are now aboard the crazy train. For no good reason, a bunch of unreconstructed Cold War hawks are suddenly wondering if maybe Russia isn’t so bad after all.
Canadian commentators are obsessed with whether It Could Happen Here. But it already has, just not as spectacularly or consequentially, with Ford. And it could certainly happen again (though, again, likely not as spectacularly or consequentially). The way I see it, there is only one solution: politicians simply have to be better. Don’t l i e. Don’t make crap up. Don’t tolerate it from your fellow travellers. Don’t make promises you have no intention of keeping. For God’s sake, just behave like the otherwise civilized human being you presumably are.