There’s due process, and then there’s the political process,
There is no presumption of innocence in politics. No due process, either. There never has been, and there shouldn’t be.
This is a fundamental truth that seems obvious enough. But after the sudden downfall of Patrick Brown, who until this week had been the leader of the Ontario Conservative Party and the front-runner to become our next premier, there have been a lot of complaints that these legal concepts have been jeopardized.
“Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?” some ask. “And besides, is what he is alleged to have done even criminal?”
So perhaps it’s worth remembering that politics is not a court of law. By definition, political battles are waged in the court of public opinion — which has very different standards than criminal courts. This is as it should be, and as it always has been. Not that it always seems fair. Did Robert Stanfield lose an election because he fumbled a football?
It is conventional wisdom that he did, in 1974. Never mind that “the best prime minister we never had” was actually, reportedly, very good at catching footballs, and never mind that skills as a wide receiver would seem to have little application to the job of prime minister. A photo of him awkwardly dropping a ball while playing catch with campaign staff appeared on the front of the Globe and Mail, and the drop in the polls that followed was precipitous.
Ridiculous? Sure. Tell it to Howard Dean, who lost his shot at becoming U.S. president because he howled a bit too loud and long during a primary victory speech.
Or Michael Dukakis, who never recovered from looking like a weenie in combat gear on a tank. Or political Jet Ski washout Stockwell Day. Or grocery-store-scanner-admirer-turned-former-president George H.W. Bush.
Voters get to make up their minds about political leaders using whatever criteria they choose. Sometimes those criteria make some kind of objective sense, and sometimes they do not. For worse, or for better. If the public decides that they’re uncomfortable with the idea of being represented by a leader who is, say, accused of being a sexually aggressive creep towards teenagers, then no further proof is necessary. As we’ve learned, the public has found less sensible reasons for disqualification.
Knowing that, political parties are free to use their own gauge of the public — and what they expect its opinion will be — to choose who they put forward to represent them during elections.
Which brings us back to Patrick Brown’s case. The time elapsed between the first hint a news story was coming detailing the allegations against Brown and his resignation was a matter of hours, which must set some kind of scandal-cycle speed record.
And what happened in those few hours was this: he presented his defence to his own most senior staff and they did not find it credible enough to support him. These are the people he hired to work most closely with him, his own team. They told him to resign and when he refused, they did.
Then, after briefly and disastrously facing the press, he made his case to his caucus — the elected MPPs he has led since taking on his job, and those who were supposed to carry campaign literature with his face on it in the upcoming election. Reportedly, he pled for his job and the time to clear his name. They too were unconvinced and insisted — unanimously, it has been reported — that he resign.
Obviously, that ain’t the justice system at work. It’s not due process. It’s a political process.
That won’t seem fair to those who believe Brown is likely a complete innocent — a victim of a possible made-up smear.
And while I’m inclined to think these allegations are likely true, I’ll admit that if it turns out that the story has somehow been completely concocted, the way this played out will certainly seem to have been unjust to Brown, and to voters, in retrospect.
But even when the stakes are far lower than alleged sexual misconduct, political calculation routinely produces some level of personal injustice.
Candidates for leadership who are imminently qualified are shunted aside because parties want “a fresh face.” Personal characteristics beyond anyone’s control, such as a candidate’s age, gender, sexuality, religion, race, place of birth or native language, are weighed as central factors in their public appeal. Rumours and innuendos and dragged-out investigations that turn up nothing routinely play a big role in the decisions parties and voters make. Ministers and staffers resign in disgrace when they’ve done nothing wrong in order to protect their parties and bosses.
It’s crappy, a lot of the time, for a lot of people.
But it’s hard to see a way around it. What people think, or suspect, or fear about a candidate or leader is an irreducibly important part of how they choose a government and of its legitimacy.
When we choose a premier, through our election process, we are choosing someone to govern us and represent us, someone who speaks on our behalf, makes life-or-death decisions for us, who spends our money and supervises chunks of our police and justice systems. If we have our doubts about someone, those doubts are an actual democratic issue.
This is where we come back around to those arguments that the allegations against Brown, even if they are precisely true, do not rise to the legal threshold of criminal sexual assault.
Maybe, maybe not. I am neither expert enough on the nuances of the law nor conversant enough with precise relevant details of the nights in question to say if these stories amount to simple “bad dates” (as one lawyer put it) or if they break the law. But that is not all that relevant to the discussion of whether Brown should have been allowed to stay on as leader.
Because I hope it’s obvious that when we go to elect a premier — or any other high office holder — we hope the summary of their personal conduct amounts to something more glowing than “not technically criminal.” These are positions of trust, and respect, and responsibility. The bar is high, or ought to be.
Maybe it seems unfair that a politician gets less benefit of the doubt than a criminal does, in the respective systems in which they are judged. But if we’re wrong about an accused criminal who is actually innocent, a good person is imprisoned. If we’re wrong about an accused politician who is actually guilty, a bad person winds up in high office. We alter the burden of proof accordingly.