What's a political promise worth?

The comic high point of the first debate was occasioned by the lady from Lac Simon who asked whether the leaders would be willing to swear on a bible (“or whatever is dearest to your heart”) that they would keep their promises.

It seemed a simple enough request. Surely a yes or no would have sufficed. Yet it seemed to catch all four leaders off their guard. Stephen Harper, after saying he was not sure he understood the question, talked of how affordable his promises were. Jack Layton rhymed off a laundry list of NDP “commitments.” Paul Martin boasted about eliminating the deficit. Gilles Duceppe took the opportunity to talk about softwood lumber.

Even after the moderator gently reminded them they hadn’t answered the question, each spent most of his remaining time, not in swearing solemn oaths to keep his promises, but in denouncing the others for failing to keep theirs. By the time they got to a followup question from another viewer, asking if there were some legal means, a class-action suit perhaps, of holding them to their word, they had lost the plot completely.

It was a telling moment. I’m not sure anyone in the political class fully realizes the extent of the damage to their own credibility from the past several decades of cynicism, lies and deceptions, from wage and price controls to the GST to the McGuinty tax pledge. This isn’t just a problem for voters. The politician who truly means what he says no longer has any means of impressing that upon the electorate. After Dalton McGuinty publicly put his signature to a promise not to raise taxes without a referendum, only to do so at the first opportunity, what else is there to say?

If there is no reward for making such commitments, and no punishment for breaking them, if the honest and the dishonest are treated just the same, then politicians will stop bothering. Or at any rate the nice guys really will finish last, having lost whatever electoral advantage their scruples might otherwise have afforded them. So we all have a stake in devising some means of holding politicans to some minimal standard of truthfulness, the profession having failed so utterly to govern itself.

It’s all very well to demand, as the advocacy group Democracy Watch has done, that the contenders for Prime Minister promise to resign if they don’t keep their promises. But this runs afoul of an obvious logical conundrum: how do we know he would not break that promise? It’s a bit like banning handguns as a means of reducing gun crime -- if criminals were the sort to obey such a law, they wouldn’t be criminals.

No, I think the lady from Lac Simon was on to something. If we are ever to regain any trust in our elected leaders, it will not be by virtue of anything they may do or say. Rather, there will have to be legal penalties attached to lying in the political arena, as there are in the commercial or legal worlds -- a “truth in politics” law. It has been said many times, but it is no less true for that: If a company issuing stock took as many liberties with the truth in its prospectus as politicians do on the campaign trail, its senior executives would all be in jail.

Now, granted, there are differences. To separate you from your money, a crooked stock issuer only has to fool you. A crooked politician has to fool a majority, or in Canada 37%, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Nor is the executive of a company under the same sort of non-stop scrutiny that a politician campaigning for office is, where every stray comment is on the public record.

So, fine, we don’t want to expose our elected officials to prosecution for the least little slip of the tongue. We may even, politics being what it is, want to leave room for a little calculated ambiguity. But what about when a politician does not want his meaning to be obscure? What do we, and he, do when he really wants to be believed?

This is where the model of an oath, such as witnesses swear in court, suggests itself. Rather than impose a legal obligation to tell the truth on politicians, what if it were left up to them to opt into it? A leader could say, “I am releasing our platform today under (say) Article 9 of the elections law” -- meaning that if any part of it were found to be false or misleading, he would be subject to the legal penalties provided therein.

I know what you’re thinking. Wouldn’t it look odd if he did not invoke “Article 9”? Wouldn’t they all be under pressure to make every public statement subject to its provisions? Exactly.