Politicians, provide a little context please
In these times of turmoil and dismay, when public fears are rampant and the danger of division is high, let us give thanks that our political leaders are doing all they can to ward off panic, to maintain social cohesion and generally instil a sense of ... oh hell, I can’t even finish this sentence it’s so preposterous.
It has been a distressing spectacle all around. It isn’t that our politicians have not been “debating” the “issues.” By now we have a fair idea of where they all stand on the threat of terrorism and how a free and democratic society should respond to it. Nor can anyone complain that the question of how to reconcile religious obligations and individual rights, diversity and unity, has not received a thorough airing. I would even go so far as to say there have been valid points made on all sides.
It’s just that every time our leaders open their traps these days, they seem to find a way to make those points in the most inflammatory, least considered, most absurdly over-the-top fashion they can possibly manage.
This is, if nothing else, a violation of their job description. We don’t ask a great deal of people in politics. We don’t expect them to be all knowing or all wise. We know that there are experts to advise them, but that even with the very best advice, they will always be at the mercy of events — events such as terrorist attacks.
What we do expect of them is that they will help the rest of us keep it together in the face of such threats: that they will use the platform they have been given to put things in perspective, to add context, to keep us focused on what matters, to ease fears, to resolve divisions, in all to find the right words to say at the right time to the right people. To be politic in other words.
At the very least, we expect them not to make things worse. And yet what has been the experience of recent days and weeks?
There is perhaps a legitimate debate to be had about what the niqab symbolizes and whether people should be able to cover their faces in citizenship ceremonies with all that they symbolize.
I think they should have that right — I think that is one of the things the ceremony symbolizes — but I recognize there are people of goodwill who take the opposite view.
That did not require the prime minister, of all people, to open up that debate, of all debates, in the immediate aftermath of an Islamist terrorist attack, of all times, at a partisan rally, of all places.
Neither did it require him to do so in such incendiary terms: it is “offensive,” he said last month, announcing the government would appeal a Federal Court ruling overturning the niqab ban; it is “anti-women” he said this week in Parliament. That he nevertheless chose to say what he did in the way that he did at the time and place that he did must therefore be regarded as deliberate, for whatever purposes he may hope it will achieve.
Likewise, there is a serious critique to be made of the government’s approach to this issue and to Canada’s Muslim population generally. It would be fair to accuse it, if not of scapegoating and marginalizing Muslims itself, then of acting with reckless disregard for that possibility — not because many of the terrorists we face today do not profess the Islamic faith, but because it has been too willing to allow others to make a more general association between the two, terrorism and Islam, or at best too slow to reject such thinking.
That did not require the leader of the Liberal party in a speech this week to make comparisons to the policy of “none is too many” pursued in the 1930s and ’40s — the deliberate refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Whatever useful point he might have hoped to make was lost at that moment. However discreditable the current government’s conduct may be, the comparison was grotesque, not only overstating present sins but trivializing those of the past.
And those were just the leaders. Perhaps Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney has a legitimate defence to offer of Bill C-51’s draconian restrictions on speech, but “the Holocaust began with words” is not one. No doubt there are terrorists who wish to attack Canada and certainly the Conservatives are entitled to present themselves and their policies as the best defence against that threat. But a fundraising appeal invoking a specific (and not terribly credible) threat against a specific location? In what way is this helpful?
The point, as I say, is not that each of these people did not have a valid argument to make. But in politics — in any field, really — it is not enough merely that what you say is logically plausible or even factually true. Context matters, too, as does tone. It’s not just what is said, but who says it and how and when and where. Jacques Parizeau may well have been right, in a narrow, statistical sense that infamous night in Quebec, when he blamed the referendum loss on “the ethnic vote.” An academic study might have come to the same conclusion — ethnic minorities, overwhelmingly federalist, provided the margin of victory — without controversy. But the context gave his remark a much darker hue.
Politicians often complain about being “quoted out of context.” It would help if they supplied a little.