No, not Mike Duffy’s resignation letter. It is a bottle of red tablets bearing the label “Anti-Bullshit Pills.”
I do not practise lèse-majesté here. That is what the label says.
I am sure Senator Wilfred Moore would share, if not the contents of the bottle, then the name of the dispensing pharmacy. To be fair to Wilfred, I should add that the bottle on his desk is unopened — no more than a signal to visitors that the bull stops here.
The PM should start with a dose of five of these pills just before he enters the House of Commons — at least on those days when he puts in an appearance.
All Conservative MPs, and all of their staff members, should be popping at least two a day, while cutting down on their drinking — especially the party Kool-Aid. The dose is three daily for every communications officer.
‘Bullshit’, you see, can be fatal, and the earlier you treat it, the better your chances of recovery. Even a return to half-truths would be an improvement. It would double the number of reliable facts being put out by the Harper government.
Most of the serious BS-ing has come from Harper and his ministerial puppets, though some has oozed from their enablers in the press and a politicized Privy Council Office. You know, the people whose motto is, ‘The truth if necessary, but not necessarily the truth’.
Like high-functioning psychopaths, the Tory pols keep trying versions of a given story until it has the desired result. In themselves, the words they use are meaningless. It all comes down to producing the desired effect. Let’s go through some of the classics from the Harper BS manual.
Here’s one of the favourites. I call it the “They hate Harper” ploy. No matter what a critic says, this form of manure management moves the debate from the substance of the criticism to its motivation. The benefits are immediate.
When you can’t answer someone’s points, you can always say he’s a big Liberal, or in the pay of foreign governments, or eats baby birds live out of the nest. That way, those of your followers who need protective ignorance of the facts have cover: “The critics just hate us.” End of story, no need to examine the facts.
There are other evasions. When caught with their pants around their ankles, Harper miscreants often try comedy. Comedy, after all, is full of forgiveness. “Look, we have always been clear, we always wear our pants around our ankles. And we’ve always said that. Clearly.”
The PM started Duffygate with stand-up comedy that didn’t stand up. Nigel Wright was a Good Samaritan with a cheque book. Mike Duffy was providing “leadership” on the expenses scandal file. I think you would agree that the narrative has, uh, evolved.
The prime minister, who spoke to Duffy about his expense problems in February, never knew a thing about how the problem was resolved until mid-May — and only then from his trusted confederates in the media. Stories like that got Pete Rose and Lance Armstrong into the Hall of Shame.
In those cases where comedy fails, there is the “Others have done the same thing” approach.
So you think Duffy is bad, the argument goes, what about those slippery Dippers who didn’t pay their taxes? What about those Liberals in Adscam bobbing for apples in the public trough? What about Laurier on reciprocity in 1911? You get the idea.
But the “others have done the same thing” version of BS is quintessentially flawed. That’s because it admits, rather than denies, wrongdoing. It just tries to spread it around, like manure.
But it is especially unhelpful when used by people who rose to power on the express promise of probity in government. Just for the record, the promise from Stephen Harper wasn’t to be as bad as, or worse than, the other guys. The promise was to clean up Ottawa, not turn it into the Sydney Tar Ponds.
And there is that other danger with demonizing your opponents for having done the same things that you’ve done. Just at the wrong moment, a fellow like Harper’s former director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, comes bobbing to the surface like a drowned man from the bottom of a polluted lake.
Soudas says his case is different from the Dippers with tax problems because he voluntarily paid his back taxes of $27,849. And so he did, as Elizabeth Thompson brilliantly reported in iPolitics — after being badgered for three years by Revenue Quebec and then facing a certificate issued in March 2012 by the Court of Quebec Civil Division.
No wonder they had to order civil servants to come to this guy’s going away party, as LaPresse noted at the time. Come to think of it, did Soudas ever obey that summons to appear before the Ethics Committee of the House of Commons? I could call the PM, but chances are he doesn’t know a thing about it.
When comedy and the bi-partisan nature of corrupt practices don’t work, the BS drill moves to the irrelevancy argument.
“No one cares.” Harper famously used the ‘no one cares’ BS when he was found in contempt of Parliament. It encouraged him. Now no one cares about misplacing $3.1 billion worth of taxpayers’ money — roughly ten times the estimated sum in Adscam. No one cares about cheating in elections. No one cares about conflict-of-interest. No one cares about general lobotomies being performed on the Harper caucus.
What do we care about in the press release reality of the Harper government? We care about beer. We care about hockey. We care about Big Government keeping us safe while we play Scratch and Lose. And we are all especially pleased that the PM’s hair will stay in place in a Force 8 gale. That’s what we care about.
But sometimes even marketing fails, no matter how many hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ dollars the PM squanders to flog a phoney image and a false record. When things get a little dodgy, as when the auditor-general becomes the purveyor of irrefutable ineptitude on the government’s part, they resort to the tried and true “apology-with-reform” gambit.
This is where the government blushes and blames the whole thing on “systemic” problems that need fixing. You know, the way Royal Commissions slam the barn door shut years after the horse has gone. And by God, the next thing you know, we’re all raising dust “moving forward together” into a sunlit future. As for the fetid deed that got the parade rolling in the first place, the less said the better.
For a very long time, BS as a communications philosophy has served Stephen Harper well. The Conservatives got away with creating facts by merely asserting them. That’s how they dealt with the inconvenient truths of the Parliamentary Budget Office, even after the KPMG audit. If the PM said it, it was so. If the Finance minister said it, it was so. If Pierre Poilievre said it, then the PM and the Finance minister had said it before. Against the wisdom of the adage that the office never sanctifies the man, they persisted in using their positions to manufacture reality.
But even a public less engaged than a Buddhist on the floor of the stock exchange has a BS threshold beyond which it is dangerous for the most diligent BS-er to go. There is considerable irony in the fact that both the mayor of Toronto and the prime minister of Canada are involved in a new political event — synchronized sinking.
Until both of them re-discover the lost art of straight answers, these fishing buddies will be in the same boat — bailing.
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