“You shouldn’t try to outsmart the truth,” the former premier told MPPs on a legislature committee. “We should just let it breathe.”
Voters could be forgiven in recent days, weeks and months for thinking all levels of government have been bent not just on outsmarting the truth, but on strangling it.
At City Hall, Mayor Rob Ford has essentially ignored public concerns that go to the heart of his fitness for office and personal well-being.
At Queen’s Park, McGuinty’s Liberal government decided in the election season of 2011, for what his successor has acknowledged were political reasons, to relocate two suburban Toronto gas plants without a clue how much it would cost — then grudgingly spooned out information while the scales eventually settled at about $585 million.
In Ottawa, the flagrant contempt of Conservative senators for spending rules, and the bizarre involvement of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff in trying to solve the problem with his own cheque-book, led this weekend to the resignation of the latter (making Nigel Wright the only player in the piece with an apparent sense of honour).
“All this coming together is remarkable,” said Professor Nelson Wiseman of the University of Toronto.
Professor Bryan Evans of Ryerson University agreed that there had been an “astonishing convergence” of, at a minimum, poor decision-making and flouting of accountability.
As usual, the ancient wisdom applies: It is not so much our mistakes that cause us grief; it is the length we go to defend them.
At all levels, the political response to a problem has succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. And the policies of deny, spin, ignore or anesthetize-by-talking-points have merely added to a cynicism about politics that rises as fast as voter turnout plummets.
Evans attributes the apparent unwillingness to admit misdeeds or mistakes to a more polarized, winner-take-all politics that has developed in Canada and elsewhere over the last several decades.
“It’s led to a different kind of politics a different style of political leadership which is more hard-edged, more brutal, more unforgiving, more may-the-winner-take-all and leave the hindmost to the devil.”
But what those bent on outsmarting the truth should take heed of, Wiseman told the Star, is that any such approach is less likely than it once may have been to succeed.
Wiseman’s theory is that lower levels of trust in government go hand in hand with higher levels of education.
“Canada has the highest percentage of people with degrees now than any of the OECD countries,” he said. “That leads to a public that actually has a more skeptical and critical disposition.
“They’re not as intimidated as they were before. People see a politician on TV, making an argument, especially when it’s straight spin, repeating himself seven times, and think, ‘Hey, you didn’t answer the question, you sound like an idiot. I could do a better job’.”
In Ford’s case, his flight from the latest scandal about his conduct — a video in which Star reporters who have seen it say the mayor appears to be smoking crack cocaine, using homophobic and ethnic slurs — is a patently inadequate defence.
Even strong supporters, as did former Speaker of the Ontario Legislature Chris Stockwell in a tweet this weekend, are saying Ford needs to explain himself. “There is no middle ground on this one,” Stockwell tweeted. “Explain why the video is untrue or resign and get help.”
The 24-hour news cycle, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Not only will silence be taken, as silence usually is, for concurrence to a proposition, it will leave a screaming void to be filled by speculation.
Wiseman said Ford should know he functions in a more competitive contemporary media culture and works with the beady eye of modern technology always at hand.
“A lot of things which were never reported now would be,” Wiseman said. “Years ago, there was all kinds of drinking going on in the legislature. People would be really soused and it was obvious to everybody. It’s just harder to keep things undercover now.”
For Evans, there has been a change in the kind of people drawn to politics — less those with big ideas and dreams of grand national projects than those bent on shrinking government and diminishing expectations.
“We can’t talk of what we’re watching here in Toronto, sadly, without connecting it to bigger forces that have been at play for nearly 40 years,” he said.
If politics involves nothing more than shrinking things, the types attracted are less inspiring; and “if your motivations are primarily about your ambition, your career, your personal interest, then you have every interest in avoiding accountability.”
The good news, Evans said, is that he is astonished at this convergence of scandal precisely because it “doesn’t happen all the time.”
There is also the unavoidable fact that, as Dalton McGuinty said during his testimony, government (like all institutions) “consists exclusively of people, with all of their noble strengths and all of their human frailties.”
Voters would probably be satisfied if those involved would just admit to those and — as most grownups do and all leaders should — accept the consequences.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Jim Coyle
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