“In this new environment, truth has become the oxygen and artifice is the kryptonite of public life.” — Alan Gregg, 2011 Gordon Osbaldeston Lecture.If truth ever comes to politics, it will sell like cold beer in hell.
No need to ask if the NDP has lost its way. No need to ask if the Liberals have lost their way.
As for the Harper government, it is so busy covering its tracks with information control, it’s now facing backwards as it lurches towards the political abyss.
Why are the Conservatives sinking in the polls, as pollster Nick Nanos recently documented?
Why is the post-Layton NDP still looking for traction, despite facing a government that confabulates with impunity as contretemps and corruption wash over the gunwales?
Why are the Liberals still unable to tease a flame out of the ashes of their former glory days, no matter how hard they try?
My thought? It’s because the one thing that confers authenticity — telling the truth to the country as you perceive it — has become a contrived and self-serving political narrative superimposed over reality.
They all do it — and what’s more important, they’re seen to be doing it by the public. People know the difference between being sized-up and being spoken to. Nothing explains better why turnout on election day is beginning to look like a rainy day at the golf course.
There is nothing to get excited about because there is nothing to believe in. And it’s not just disingenuous politicians trolling for votes that have turned people off.
The institutions of governance have become as moribund as the characters that run them. The PMO is more like a nuclear bunker than the prime minister’s workplace. Treasury Board might as well be boarded up, so hermetically sealed has it become about public business. No one — not the Department of Finance, not the Canada Revenue Agency — even responds to the Parliamentary Budget Office. Debate in the House of Commons is as dead as the dodo. Reading speeches into the record written by staffers hardly counts as earning your pay.
Question period is the unwatchable in pursuit of the brain-dead. The high point is usually the low point. Remember when the honourable members seemed recently to think they were squaring off in the parking lot at Dairy Queen, rather than conducting the country’s business in the House of Commons under parliamentary rules?
A Harris/Decima poll found that only one per cent of respondents believed that politicians tell the truth all of the time. The same poll found that about half of Canadians believe that every time a politician’s lips move, there is a 50/50 chance that a lie will come out. You couldn’t run a business or a marriage — and shouldn’t be able to run a political party — on those numbers.
In that same poll, some good news: three-quarters of respondents said they would vote for a candidate they believed was telling them the truth.
As things stand now, though we are in possession of the official narrative from all parties, we actually know next to nothing of what is really going on. It is the oligarch’s dream and the democrat’s nightmare. The scattered ATIP story, the odd whistleblower, the almost non-existent departmental leak — these are all that occasionally lift the informational fog in which the country gropes for its bearings, not knowing who to trust, and so trusting no one.
Wouldn’t it be nice (and why is it so hard) to know how much those F-35s really cost? Wouldn’t it be peachy if Parliament — not just one political party — had the facts on the budget?
Wouldn’t everyone sleep a little better if the Senate wasn’t passing judgement on its own porcine practices and we knew exactly what those practices cost us?
Wouldn’t the nation’s spirits be lifted if the prime minister, or even some cabinet minister, put down the talking points and said something that was true rather than merely advantageous?
And wouldn’t it be especially beneficial if the Opposition refused to be whipped, or strategic, or both, and stood its ground on something — drew a line in the mud? Might that not bring to a grinding halt the politics of fear, deceit and division that passes for governance these days?
None of that will happen as long as how one manages to get elected — not why one runs — remains the burning preoccupation and the standard of success for our public office holders. Perhaps there is one thing more important in their minds: how to deter the maximum number of people from feeling important enough to vote.
There is always the Lance Armstrong option: cheat. Elections Canada is investigating possible links between the Conservative campaign and allegations of voter-suppression efforts in 56 ridings across the country. Another tactic is to bury information deep instead of sharing it — the hallmark of the Harper approach to governing.
Still another is to so discredit politics as a spectator sport that the building empties. We are rapidly getting there.
Pollsters, marketers, and communications mercenaries by the thousands have gotten between the politicians and voters in the national conversation. What is largely noted in the media is the victor’s technique, not the quality of his policies or whether he lives up to them in office.
It hardly seems to matter anymore whether we get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, political success having become an end in itself. Countries are won like chips at a blackjack table and treated like personal possessions until the next spin of the wheel.
But Harris/Decima did find that huge market for garden-variety honesty in Canadian politics. Which party is best able to tap into it?
Not the Conservatives, at least not under their current leader. Stephen Harper’s liability is the same one that destroyed Brian Mulroney and along with him, the Progressive Conservative party. Both men could offer a defence of their most controversial actions. But the defence invariably fails when the defender is bereft of credibility. Harper has reached the point where his office has not an aura, but an odour.
Short of a leadership change and a new cast of principled characters, the current government has reached its high-water mark and the tide is inching out.
On the face of it, the NDP should have the best chance of connecting with the Honesty Constituency in a disillusioned country. But Thomas Mulcair, formidable as a politician and an intellect, has so far exhibited the common touch of Michael Ignatieff. Worse, the Sherbrooke Declaration looks more like party self-interest than a commitment to federalism. That time-bomb comtinues to tick.
The party could have opted for Nathan Cullen — he had just enough of Jack Layton’s personability and sufficient brashness to pass the authenticity test. He said what he thought and didn’t come off like the others. But Cullen is not the leader; a Harper-like tactician is.
The wild card in the honesty sweepstakes is the Liberal Party. Justin Trudeau could run the table if Canadians are allowed to glimpse his real personality, as mercurial as it can be, and decide they like what they see.
He is not just a pretty boy with a punch. Beneath the halo of star power, and beyond the grip of handlers, there is a rebel soul there. Whether it will ever be permitted to show is another matter. The temptation is always to cosset the franchise player and that’s what the party brass thinks he is.
Which is where Joyce Murray bears watching. There is no question of dynastic roots or political genes, attenuated or otherwise, with this daughter of British Columbia. Murray passes the most fundamental authenticity test of them all — what you see is what you get and that is pretty attractive. Straightforward, without affectation, clear-sighted in her goals — from social justice to being able to take a legal toke. At this moment in time, she is the Liberal party’s most authentic candidate.
As the brilliant Alan Gregg pointed out during the Osbaldeston Lecture, the first decade of the millennium has been characterized by how “disengaged and unaffected” Canadians feel from the whole political process.
As all parties have yet to learn, Cheez Whiz politics is no way to run a democracy. Cheez Whiz politics is bad for everyone.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
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