A Plurality of Cynics?

I’m taking aim at a couple of politicians this week who are already big targets: Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau. However, I’m not objecting to their decisions as such; I’m objecting to their cynicism.

Let’s start off with Doug Ford. Mr. Ford’s Conservatives won 40.5 per cent of the popular vote in the June, 2018 provincial election. Yet under our ‘winner take all’ electoral system, the Conservatives took 74 of the 125 seats in the Ontario legislature.

Mr. Ford interpreted this—as do all plurality winners—as a mandate from the people to implement his agenda. But he never bothered to tell people what his agenda was. Instead, in the middle of last fall’s Toronto municipal election campaign, he suddenly announced that he was cutting the number of municipal constituencies in half—the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms be damned. I see that acting without notice as a deeply cynical move.

Mr. Ford has made a number of unpopular moves, and his first flock of cabinet members may have paid for them (he might have to watch his back a little more closely when he enters the cabinet room, and would be well advised to stay home on March 15). But what I object to is the appointment of barely qualified cronies connected to his now-departed chief of staff Dean French to trade representative posts in London and New York.

Sure, Mr. French took the fall over the fiasco, and the appointments were rescinded; but the damage was done. The appointments were made by Mr, Ford, and he had to have known that these people were not the best possible candidates. And it wasn’t the only time he had been caught out in cronyism; the selection of Ron Taverner as OPP commissioner was undone after his connections to Mr. Ford were exposed. All in all, It was a cynical exercise.

I also want to take a poke at Justin Trudeau. Before the 2015 election—when his party stood third in the number of its members of parliament—he promised that the election would be the last ‘first past the post’ vote under which the party that won only the plurality could hold the majority of seats. As things turned out in 2015, the Liberals were put in exactly the same position as Mr. Ford’s Conservatives: they received a plurality of 29.5 per cent of the votes cast, but wound up with184 of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. And they also treated the vote as a mandate to govern in accordance with their promises.

The promised investigation into alternatives was duly commenced after the election, but quickly encountered criticism for its lack of substance and direction. Mr. Trudeau, now that he was sitting in the catbird seat, opted to abandon his promise rather than overhaul the investigation, which has probably poisoned the well of proportional representation in the House of Commons for some years to come. I can’t help but see his motives in abandoning the promise as cynical.

Mr.  Trudeau was at it again earlier this month with the announcement of the go-ahead of the Trans Mountain pipeline. He characterized it as proof that protecting the environment and creating resource industry jobs by building and operating the pipeline can both be accomplished concurrently. He said this was so because growth in resource industry jobs will create wealth that will be available to create new era jobs, and all the profits from the pipeline will go towards supporting clean technologies.

Mr. Trudeau is trying to dress up a messy political decision as a miraculous coming together of oil and water. I don’t object to the messy political decision that his government made to approve the pipeline— that’s the sort of decision that we pay the politicians to make. But it is cynical to paint the decision as a big concurrent win for environmental policy; and doubly cynical to do so when you have just declared a climate emergency.

Cynicism is an attribute that can be developed by politicians after having had to make those messy compromise decisions over a period of years: it it is not an attribute that one should bring to the job. And if politicians become cynical, it should be a signal to them that their shelf life has expired—that’s why we have generous parliamentary pensions. Give me an idealistic neophyte politician over a jaded veteran any day, even though the young politician may eventually turn into another jaded veteran.

Postscript: I heard democracy activist Dave Meslin speak about alternative voting systems at the Library earlier this month. I’m looking forward to reading his book Teardown: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca