We desperately need to rethink how we conduct politics

HALIFAX—Last week’s federal cabinet shuffle made all the usual headlines, but raised another issue not often mentioned: the desperate need to rethink how we conduct politics. Let’s start with the first part. In that brief burst of hope that flashes whenever a government hits the reset button, there were stories about who was in, who was out, and who was brand new. And, of course, stories about which Liberal cabinet ministers might now be best positioned to contest for the top job, should Justin Trudeau get tired of being swarmed and sworn at in public by thugs and boors posing as protesters. In the category of people to watch, Dominic LeBlanc, Sean Fraser, and Anita Anand all voyaged upward, at least they did according to the metric of their now-greater ministerial status. The second matter raised by the cabinet shuffle? The crying need to examine how we conduct our public life in this country, and to do something about it. When it came time for Pierre Poilievre to offer his reaction to the government’s facelift, the leader of the opposition proved once again that he will have to do a lot more than take off his glasses to improve his image with Canadians. Not even a ski mask could conceal the meanness of his response. Politics is not Sunday school. No one—including yours truly—expected Poilievre to offer any bouquets to the ministers, old and new, of what will likely be Trudeau’s election cabinet, whenever voting day comes. But there wasn’t a pinch of civility, a drop of statesmanship, or a scintilla of decorum in his response, just a dreary litany of the government’s alleged failures. Poilievre claimed that after eight years of Trudeau, the sky is falling. It sounded so old. Canadians, he claimed, have to choose between heating their homes and eating. The carbon tax, you see, is to blame. Immigrants can’t work. Housing is unaffordable. Mortgage payments and rents have doubled. Housing costs in Canada are the highest in the G7. There is disorder in the streets. Every town and metropolis has tent cities, and violent offenders roaming the streets who have been released from prison. And, of course, Chrystia Freeland is not the minister of finance, she is the minister of deficits. Bottom line? After eight years of JT, everything is broken. Only PP can make Canada great again. It is one thing to cast the appropriate lights and shadows over your opponent's record. Every politician does that to some degree. But it is quite another to paint a portrait in black of every single thing that any government, including the one to which Poilievre used to belong, does or did. And it is something less than honest to offer such a blanket condemnation of your opponent without offering anything by way of explaining how firing Trudeau and hiring Poilievre would leave Canadians better off. How would Poilievre make housing cheaper? How would he control food and energy prices, the main drivers of the kind of inflation that everyone feels? I take it he is still a free-market guy, so wage and price controls aren’t the answer. So what is? No real substance from Poilievre beyond “common sense” solutions. Really? Like ditching the carbon tax while the planet is alternately drowning or burning? Like not regulating the energy industry, as the Harper government chose to do when it was calling the shots? By firing the governor of the Bank of Canada? By using bitcoin as a hedge against inflation? In blaming Trudeau for everything that is wrong in this upside-down world, Poilievre never comments on a remarkable thing. Trudeau is not the president of the United States, the prime minister of Britain, or the chancellor of Germany. Yet all of these countries—and many more—are facing the same problems as Canada: inflation, high housing costs, large deficits, and worried citizens. In a global environment, Poilievre remains a parochial thinker. The plain truth? A lot of the problems in Canada are not made in Canada. And it is intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. Which, in a way, is the chief problem with our politics. The extreme adversarial system that our democracy has morphed into has replaced dialogue with tedious talking points. None of us really knows who Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre, or Jagmeet Singh really are. We know them through soundbites, screw-ups, and scripted lines aimed at skewering the other guy. We know them when someone throws a stone in their direction. But we don’t have a clue of what they really think. Beyond the talking points, the slanders and slurs, beyond the incoherence of constant popularity polling, voters don’t really know the people they are voting for. The main reason for that is that our politicians never have to enter a forum where they have to think. With the fast-food media leading the way, they just water-ski across the surface of events, and never have to enter the depths. Our so-called televised debates during elections are not designed to showcase the knowledge of candidates, or their real differences. They are an exercise in insulating them from any meaningful exchange. Since truth resides in a nuance, voters learn little from these corseted encounters. The whole exercise has come down to watching to see if someone gets skewered with a rapier thrust. You know, the way Brian Mulroney nailed John Turner back in the day. Here is my answer to our dilemma, to the informational starvation everyone is suffering from. Why not create a special series of hour-long television shows, say four times a year, in which our political leaders engage in conversation? Not person-to-person combat, not media cage-fighting, but real conversations where the viewer could see how the people who want to run the country really think. A format where you couldn’t get away with glib one-liners, but one where your knowledge or lack of it would be on display. Now that would be an item for pay TV. Michael Harris is an award winning author and journalist. The Hill Times

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We desperately need to rethink how we conduct politics

Beyond the talking points, slanders and the incoherence of constant polling, voters don’t really know the people they are voting for because politicians never have to enter a forum where they have to think.

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