Some promises deserve to be broken
Though they are more often smacked as pusillanimous deceivers, politicians can be pigheaded. As a result, many — more often on the right, curiously — like to brag “promise made, promise kept!”
Some promises, however, deserve to be broken.
Bob Rae soon abandoned public auto insurance when he was Ontario’s premier in the 1990s. Despite spending five years helping to lead the campaign to deliver this relief to Ontario’s drivers, I have to admit he was probably right. Some policies don’t scale, and therefore can’t fly.
Public insurers have worked marvelously in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Not so much in British Columbia, where the public insurer just dumped a several-hundred-million-dollar deficit mess, ironically, on the new NDP government.
Ontario auto insurance is still expensive, frequently a victim of fraud, and not famous for its management. The reasons have much to do with complexity and scale. It’s not obvious that changing the ownership would have fixed this decades-old problem.
In 1990, as the province plunged suddenly into recession, it would have meant thousands of lost small-town jobs and a huge political battle. The Rae government had bigger and more urgent challenges. A promise probably wisely broken.
Dalton McGuinty was understandably enraged at the mess Mike Harris and Ernie Eves had made of the sale of Hwy. 407. Like the biggest country rubes ever to enter a negotiation, they told their buyers the government needed as much cash, delivered immediately, as possible.
Their deficit mess was a ball and chain for which they could not keep blaming Bob Rae forever. Did this improve the sale price? Well, no. Did this enable the buyers to demand ridiculous freedoms forever — like sole control of driver fees? Well, yes.
As a campaigning opposition leader, McGuinty pledged to end this sad abrogation of public responsibility. However, he was warned by his lawyers that he had no hope of breaking the contract Harris had signed. McGuinty wasted tens of millions of dollars and nearly six years of postponed construction time before being legally defeated. His 407 promise was one probably better abandoned.
Now Mike Harris’ protégé has come to power in Ontario with another big pledge: “Cap and trade, the carbon tax, is done!” Is this true? Well, no. Is it going to cost the province millions in legal battles and lost revenues? Well, yes. Oh, and will he leave the taxpayers open to liability suits for billions of dollars from those holding now worthless carbon credits? Yes.
Will Ottawa successfully replace cap and trade with a carbon tax and will Doug Ford take the cash? Of course he will. He’ll have a very large deficit to manage, as well. Not too late to park this promise, premier-designate.
Andrea Horwath, justifiably enraged at the Wynne government’s broken promise on the public ownership of Hydro One, pledged to buy it back. By the time she has her next chance to become premier, it will probably be too late. A new NDP government could do what the Brits are working on, however, which is to buy back enough of their privatized water and railways to reassert decision-making control. A promise amended, as it were.
The conventional wisdom is that those who break promises destroy public trust in democracy. It’s not that simple, and not always true.
Sometimes government reveals what you could not have known in opposition. When the facts or the numbers are altered by external events, it’s better to admit it. Explain why you must change your approach, openly and contritely, and move on.
On the campaign trail, where bold promises are designed to be great votegetters, it’s wise to leave yourself a back door. There are always surprises ahead.
How you keep or break a promise matters almost as much as the promise itself.
Probably not wise, for example, to break a promise to build two gas plants mere days before election day, to try to save two threatened ridings, inflicting hundreds of millions in unnecessary cost on taxpayers, and then try to destroy the evidence.
But as Churchill wryly explained to a voter complaining about a broken promise, “When the facts change, I change my mind, madam. What do you do?”
Robin V. Sears is a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, was an NDP strategist for 20 years, and is a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robinvsears