National Post (National Edition)
What if we refused to tell political lies?
As we close the newspaper on 2018 with a sneer and look forward to 2019 with trepidation, I have a few predictions. Expect the unexpected and don’t believe things that get breathless attention today will matter when we look back five or 10 years hence. Ow. The truth hurts.
Actually most of what you’ll end up going “Yeah, 2019, that was the year…” won’t be public policy at all. At least I hope not. When it’s that important it’s usually really bad. As in “the year Hitler invaded Poland” bad or “the year the Great Depression started” bad. And even when it’s “the year we won World War II” you generally get “and without noticing it entered the Cold War before the shooting even stopped.”
It also generally has little to do with what preoccupied the chattering classes until the giant headlines appeared. So we probably won’t go “2018 was the year Canada pledged at Katowice to meet greenhouse gas targets then actually did.” We’re more likely to look back and say “Remember when everybody who was anybody said CO2 was the control knob on the global thermostat and spent billions on windmills” or some such.
Perhaps you’re finding me cynical here or at least discouraging. But I won’t apologize because if what we’re currently doing isn’t going to look that great in retrospect you need to know.
In public policy in particular I often get the feeling participants think they’re going to live about 700 years so there’ll be ample time to do the right thing once they lie their way into power. Well, there won’t. And remember, politician or regular Jane, 2019 could be the year you unexpectedly died.
Oh, now you’re being cheerful, the reader may cry. Possibly literally. But in an odd way I am. Because it might be liberating to consider what you’d do, in public and private, if you thought “This is the one I want them to remember me by” instead of “Just warming up here”. Would you utter polished quarter-truths, cheer blatant deceit, hurl tribal insults and waste the precious days you’ve been given on trivialities?
In a recent interview with the National Post, our Prime Minister defended spending money we don’t have by asking if you preferred “kids will have more nutritious lunches” to the Conservatives “balancing the budget at all cost, cutting programs and services”. As if anyone, including him, thinks that’s what Stephen Harper did or Andrew Scheer is promising.
If the excuse for this sort of blather is that it persuades people, it still wouldn’t be good enough. But if it doesn’t, and in quoting these remarks John Ivison noted that Trudeau’s unpopularity ratings now rival Trump’s, what on Earth could justify doing it in what might be the brief period before he’s elected ex-prime Minister?
Late in the Cold War, I believe, someone wrote that if everyone living under Communism resolved not to lie for one day the system would collapse. In the name of honesty I admit I cannot now find the quotation and may simply be remembering the bit in Vaclav Havel’s 1978 The Power of the Powerless where he imagines what would happen to a shopkeeper who keeps unreflectively posting a conformist “Workers of the world, unite!” sign in his window if “one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support.”
He would be punished, of course. But also freed internally. And since we do not live in a state of fear, what’s our excuse? Virtually nothing most politicians say is true, even on the rare occasions that it’s sincere. Why put up with it?
Why not vote for people who admit you can’t balance the budget without cutting popular programs? Or say my opponent seems confused but thoroughly decent and I don’t have all the answers either. Or discard the slick 20-something-authored focus-grouped speech they don’t believe or understand and instead say life is hard?
Actually Ivison cited the PM, in one year-end interview, confessing that getting Communist China to release victims is far more difficult than he thought when he used to berate Harper for not doing it. Refreshing. And as far as I know, he hasn’t been ripped apart for it.
So maybe there’s something there to build on. But let’s not wait for politicians. Let’s be the greengrocer. Let’s make 2019 the year we refuse to applaud mindless slogans and be accessories to political lies.
It might even make the headlines. And it would be one for the history books.
VIRTUALLY NOTHING MOST POLITICIANS SAY IS TRUE. — JOHN ROBSON