Much of the blame belongs to voters
When the Trudeau Liberals f ol ded l i ke cheap l awn furniture on electoral reform, a number of people denounced them as arrogant liars. But what if they sincerely meant what millions of voters sincerely believed?
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair called their promise that first- past- the- post would soon be toast “A massive political deception.” ( Yes, he is still their leader, despite having apparently acquired a cloak of invisibility Harry Potter or the Klingons would envy.) But I find this Machiavellian interpretation implausible for two reasons.
First, I don’t think this particular pledge was im- portant to many voters, so it wasn’t a lie worth telling to secure a parliamentary majority. And second, if they’d known it was a lie they would surely have grasped that it would be exposed quickly, doing them far more lasting harm than ephemeral good.
To say so is not to deny or excuse that they said the thing that is not. Repeatedly. As my colleague John Ivison noted, even if they weren’t scoffing up their sleeves the whole time, “There is no doubt … they have broken a campaign promise … As Mulcair pointed out, the pledge was made 1,813 times.”
Ivison added that while people who like the current system might welcome their backing down, “for those who voted for Trudeau as an antidote to political cynicism — and in the hope he would overturn what they consider an unjust electoral system — it is nothing short of a betrayal.” In fact, as someone who would strongly have urged Canadians to reject PR or STV or WKW ( Who Knows What) in a referen- dum, I too regard not putting electoral reform to the public after all that promising as a serious betrayal, especially in an era of rampant and too often justified political cynicism.
The key question is, what kind of betrayal? A simple, cunning lie? Or something deeper and weirder?
Another colleague, Andrew Coyne lampooned the Liberals for blithely shifting blame for this policy debacle to the public, claiming it was we who didn’t show leadership, not them. “For as the prime minister patiently explained — not to you, but to his minister — ‘ without a clear preference or a clear question, a referendum would not be in Canada’s interest.’ Perhaps you think framing a clear question is the government’s job. Perhaps you imagine the point of a referendum is to find out what people prefer … But that is because you are still, even at this late date, investing some literal meaning in the prime minister’s words, as if what he said and what he intended bore any relationship to each other.”
Coyne then rattled off a list of discarded Liberal pledges like $10 billion deficits for three years, an open fighter plane competition, etc. But in the Liberals’ view, he concluded indignantly, “It is not their fault for lying to you. It is your fault for believing them.” And the problem is, it sort of is.
People like Justin Trudeau genuinely believe virtually all public policy problems arise from narrow-mindedness or actual malice. In short, a failure of the will, not the how. And they make no secret of it.
As I recently argued about Jane Fonda wishing away reliance on fossil fuels, they endorse what Thomas Sowell calls an “unconstrained” vision in which sufficient virtue and good intentions sweep away obstacles and any mention of historically demonstrated practical difficulties is timidity at best and wilful obstruction at worst. People with that mindset or, dare I say it, ideology do not believe in tradeoffs, tough choices or intractable problems from war to human nature. They believe that all good things naturally come together as do all bad ones, which is how “racist sexist homophobic” became a single word.
To refer to what they “intended” in terms of practical implementation rather than aspirational goals is to misunderstand how their minds work at a very fundamental level. “How?” is to them a distraction or a malevolent ploy. If governments like Stephen Harper’s do not solve all problems swiftly and painlessly it is because they do not want to, probably for sinister or disreputable motives.
Thus expressed it sounds childish. But how else to explain the amazing rickety pile of promises the Liberals made without any serious hint of a plan for achieving them? Or its electoral success?
To a peculiar degree, the fatuities politicians spout during and between elections accurately reflect their thinking.
And it must be possible to believe such stuff sincerely, because millions of Canadian voters did. Including spending recklessly within a balanced budget and painlessly dumping our time- tested, admittedly imperfect voting system for some universally popular, unspecified alternative from the land of Oz.
It does not excuse the Liberals constructing an extravagant platform from planks they did not even try to understand. But it is collapsing under our weight too.
I DON’T THINK THIS PARTICULAR PLEDGE WAS IMPORTANT TO MANY VOTERS.