A call for a return to rationality
Election year: Let’s check our facts before forming opinions
Here’s a thought for 2015: let’s have more thinking this year and less uninformed criticism and opinion. Perhaps it’s a bold thing for a columnist to suggest. Heaven and discerning readers know that there are days when deadline looms and the fingers must simply type out words and paragraphs even if the research behind it is scant.
But columnists are hardly alone in passing off knee-jerk reaction or ideological cant as opinion.
The Twitter-verse and other social media is rife with it. Public arguments fuelled by misinformation provoke people’s worst fears and prejudices. In extreme cases, attacks of madmen are conflated with planned acts of terrorism or cited as evidence of systemic racism or abuse of power.
But the real challenge to the prospect of a year of critical thinking in Canada is that 2015 is also a federal election year.
At every political level, negative campaigning has worked. All politicians profess to hate it even as they do it.
Last year, Vancouver mayoral candidate Kirk LaPointe — a former journalist — began his campaign saying that he would quit if his party went negative. Yet, in 2015, LaPointe may find himself in court trying to prove the allegations that Mayor Gregor Robertson says are defamatory.
The sniping and personal attacks almost invariably supersede policy discussions, dominating social media and filling the insatiable 24/7 news cycle because they are easy to understand, fast to tweet and quicker to share.
If ever there is a time when finding the truth is most crucial, it’s during elections.
We’re going to be barraged with half-truths and deliberate omissions. Apples will be compared to oranges. Then, the false comparisons will be endlessly repeated in ads and social media, often drowning out attempts to correct the record.
But, this year, fact-checking may be more difficult than ever.
The Conservatives have fired and muzzled government scientists, given away libraries of scientific information.
It means that it’s more difficult than ever to get a dispassionate view of climate change, a cost-benefit analysis of a pipeline, an evaluation of the health of either the West Coast fishery or levels of radiation from the damaged Japanese reactor.
Often, it means having to ferret it out through peerreviewed papers or in studies where Canadian information is shared with international researchers. Or it means having to get information from special-interest groups, which almost certainly leaves that open to attack for being slanted.
The Conservatives have also gutted Statistics Canada. Abolishing the long-form census has had a profound impact on the reliability of myriad data, making some of it virtually of no use at all.
That critical set of data relating to social and economic changes in Canada is no longer available, including statistics related to family incomes and child poverty.
Without that data, it makes it more difficult to argue that there ought to be more public money allotted to school breakfast programs or welfare payments.
The lack of good data also results in public- opinion researchers and pollsters having less reliable information to determine representative samples of Canadians to interview.
Not that good data has stopped the government from pursuing unnecessary public policies.
Consider the Conservatives’ tough-on-crime agenda.
Using a traditional measure, the national crime rate is at its lowest level since 1969; using an index that measures the severity of crime, it’s down 36 per cent from only a decade ago.
But the blistering pace to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist resulted last summer in the Senate debating the wrong crime bill.
It’s true that some crimes have increased. Among them are the sexual violations of children, child pornography, aggravated sexual assault, extortion and identity theft.
Yet, those weren’t the only crimes targeted in changes — often buried deep in omnibus bills — that have been pushed through Parliament.
This swamp of misinformation, disinformation and ad hominem attacks is eroding citizens’ trust in politicians, politics and even democracy.
We live in an interesting time. In a world more complicated and inter-connected than it has ever been, never has the cacophony of opinion been so loud.
But as American John Gardner wrote in 1968, we need to be wary of “uncritical lovers” and “unloving critics.”
We need a return to rationality and reason. We should insist on being able to access the best possible information. We also need to be more discerning about where we find our information and more critical of it before we pass it and opinions on.
It means slowing down and likely losing the race to be first to tweet an opinion.
But my hope for this year is that we’ll all finally begin to recognize the value of an informed opinion over a misinformed war of words.