It is time for "full and fair" political disclosure

Do they take us for fools? Oh indeed they do. And why not? Fools that we are, we are ripe for the taking -- again and again and again.

It would seem inconceivable that the new Liberal government in Ontario would actually think it could get away with the Cupboard is Bare routine. It has been played so often by so many incoming regimes, with such transparent tendentiousness, that common sense would suggest it could only backfire on the party that tried it.

Yet here we are, again. My God! You mean we have a $5.6-billion deficit? If we'd only known. Right, then: you can forget all those billions of dollars in new spending we promised you. It's the same game, the same lines -- and it's working. Like a charm.

When the new government issued revised projections for this year's deficit, purporting to show that the balanced budget the outgoing Conservatives had promised was in fact a projected $5.6-billion shortfall, the media almost wrote the script for them. "It's back to the drawing board for Premier Dalton McGuinty," wrote the Toronto Star. "Every spending promise he made on the campaign trail is now at risk of being pulled down." When, sure enough, Mr. McGuinty followed by announcing an increase in the price of electricity that weeks ago he had vowed would remain where it was -- the first step on the long march back from the platform on which he was elected -- the headline in the Globe and Mail was boundless in its sympathy. "Deficit drives McGuinty to end power rate freeze," it said.

As for Mr. McGuinty, he was busy dressing up this bit of refried duplicity as a principled, even selfless act of political bravery. "This may not be popular," he averred. "It may not be in our immediate self-serving political interest. But we firmly believe that it is in the public interest." After all -- pause for lump in throat -- "it is the right thing to do."

Well, now. If it is the right thing to do now, after the election, why was it not the right thing to say before the election? Because, says Mr. McGuinty, "the world changed" that black day -- Wednesday, actually -- when the "true" deficit numbers were revealed. It's one thing, he said, to subsidize energy consumption via artificially low rates "when the province is in surplus," but with the shocking news that the province has a deficit, Mr. McGuinty is suddenly persuaded that prices should "better reflect the costs of electricity."

Leave aside that the Liberals' $5.6-billion figure for the deficit is just as cooked as the Tories' "balanced budget" ever was (the Tories promised unspecified asset sales and spending cuts that would reduce the implied deficit; the Liberals assume these would never have happened, and add them back in). The point is that there is no actual surprise in any of this. Mr. McGuinty knew that the budget was not in balance, that it was in fact at least $2-billion and probably closer to $4-billion in deficit -- and knew it just as surely as his Tory counterpart, Ernie Eves, did.

Both sides knew that the budget was a fraud, yet both sides campaigned as if it were not. The Tories promised tax cuts they knew they could not afford at current spending levels. The Liberals promising spending increases to the tune of $5.4-billion per year, knowing they could never implement them. And both parties persisted in the fiction that Hydro rates could be frozen at below-market levels until 2006. The Liberals are the ones who have the privilege of reneging on their promises, because they won the election. But the Tories would just as surely have done the same.

(We now hear, via the usual unnamed sources, that the Tories were secretly planning to privatize the LCBO and parts of Hydro One, which might have brought them a little closer to the mark. But, like the Liberals, the Tories chose not to share their plans with the voters, and so can hardly complain of ill-treatment.)

What is at issue here is not the particular disingenuousness of these two parties. What is at issue is the political culture that allows this sort of nonsense to continue, year after year after year. If we were serious about democracy, if we took the meaning of popular sovereignty to heart -- as Churchill put it, that government is the servant of the people and not the master -- we would not put up with being lied to so brazenly by the help.

People in the private sector, God knows, are capable of no less breathtaking deceptions. The difference is that in private life, there are penalties. The company that issues a prospectus materially misrepresenting the state of its finances faces the prospect of heavy fines; its executives, imprisonment. It isn't just that they are not permitted to make false statements. They are not permitted even to leave a false impression, by omission as much as commission. Anything less than "full and fair" disclosure is grounds for legal action. And everyone agrees the stock market could not function without such rules.

Perhaps it is time, as the activist group Democracy Watch has suggested, for similar laws regulating the political market. At a minimum, we need "truth in budgeting" laws, requiring independent scrutiny of government fiscal projections. But there's no reason to spare opposition politicians, on the threadbare excuse that "we haven't seen the books." They know. They knew.

Whatever the means, this has to stop. It is dishonourable of politicians to carry on in this way. But it is humiliating that a free people should submit to it.