But when the Conservatives admitted in November that they were spreading a false rumour about Liberal MP Irwin Cotler in his Montreal riding, it had that feel.
It wasn’t even the act itself, odious though it was, but the defence of it by Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan, who characterized it as a matter of freedom of speech.
The rumour, which has dogged Cotler ever since he first won in the riding a dozen years ago, was used by a firm hired by the Conservatives as a reason for calling constituents in his riding of Mount Royal to identify Conservative supporters.
If they asked why they were being called, they were told that there was a rumour Cotler was leaving and there might be a byelection.
Van Loan scoffed at the notion that there was anything wrong with the practice because he said it was true there was a rumour, even though the Conservatives knew the rumour wasn’t true.
The Speaker of the House has now ruled that while the action by the Conservatives was “reprehensible,” he didn’t have the authority to rule that it breached the rules of Parliament.
But how will this reprehensible behaviour fare in the court of public opinion?
In a year that started with some hope, spawned by the tragic shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, that the nasty rhetoric of politics might be tempered somewhat, Van Loan’s lowering of the bar for ethical behaviour should have been seen as a step in the wrong direction.
But sadly, Canadians have come to expect that as in war, truth is too often the first casualty in politics. The standard for ethical language is not what best represents the facts of the matter, but what a politician can get away with.
It has become fashionable to defend negative advertising on the basis that it works. Negative ads often take a bit of truth and use it to give a false impression by taking it out of context or ignoring the fact that it has been superseded.
Happily, negative advertising doesn’t always work. The ads attacking the NDP in the last federal election didn’t have much traction and the NDP’s largely positive ads featuring Jack Layton turned out to be more effective.
But even when a negative message takes root, as it did with then Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, there is collateral damage. Language is the currency of political debate. When the currency is devalued, as it is when politicians treat truth as an endlessly elastic commodity, two things happen.
First, the chance of honest compromise diminishes. The kind of intelligent conversations that ordinary people have in which disparate views can be woven into novel solutions that neither might have thought of on their own, rarely happen.
Instead, debates are another form of battle in which words are slung over the heads of the opposing side in a never-ending campaign to win over voters.
Second, the disrespect politicians show for truth in their enthusiasm for tearing each other down seeps into the popular view of politics and politicians, which is often summarized as “they are all a bunch of crooks.”
While that’s clearly not true, it isn’t much of a stretch to get to that assessment from the terms politicians use to describe each other.
None of this will change until voters start demanding better. We need to persuade politicians of the need to improve their image so that they become leaders we can look up to instead of people we hold with the same contempt they show for each other.
We need to stop making allowances for politicians who define truth as not being able to be pinned down in a lie. The fact that so many of them are willing to misrepresent their opponents, to lie about what they stand for and then attack them on the basis of those lies, doesn’t make it right.
We need to punish at the ballot box politicians who don’t understand that without trust, there can be no respect and without truth there can be no trust.
Origin
Source: Vancouver Sun
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