What's Happened to Politics? - Softcover

Bob Rae was elected eleven times to the House of Commons and the Ontario legislature between 1978 and 2013. He was Ontario’s 21st Premier from 1990 to 1995, and served as interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011 to 2013. He is working now as a lawyer, negotiator, mediator, and arbitrator, with a particular focus on first nations, aboriginal, and governance issues. He also teaches at the University of Toronto School of Governance and Public Policy, and is a widely respected writer and commentator.

An author of four books and many studies and reports, Bob Rae is a Privy Councillor, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of Ontario, and has numerous awards and honorary degrees from institutions in Canada and around the world. Bob is married to Arlene Perly Rae, a writer and speaker, and they have three children. They live in Toronto.

What’s Happened to Politics? CHAPTER ONE

WHAT’S HAPPENED TO POLITICS?

What exactly has gone wrong with politics? We need to be precise about the diagnosis before we can identify the remedies. That there is a widespread disillusionment with politics is undoubtedly true. There is a universal tendency to hearken back to a golden age of politics and public policy, to see through a gauzy lens to some time when men and women deliberated solemnly on the issues of the day, unsullied by the lure of lobbyists or the odour of self-interest. Such a time never existed. Politics has never been that way. No time has been free from the golden age of bullshit and the inevitable push and pull of who gets what, when, where, and how. But something has happened in our current time to create an aura of phony salesmanship that is even more pungent than the whiff of other times. What is it exactly?

I am not a social scientist, a philosopher, or a seer, but rather a mere mortal who has spent most of his life in politics, public service, the law, and education. I see no contradiction between a life of action and one of reflection, and I have tried to remain curious about the human condition. I do not see politics as inherently corrupt or evil—in fact, quite the opposite. I see it as a necessary endeavour, the deterioration of which troubles me not just because I do not like to see an important part of my life reviled, but because an improvement in the quality of public discourse is a good thing in itself. We are all somehow cheapened when politics and public life go sour.

The challenges we face are not just political. They involve broader issues in our society. Nor are the challenges confined to Canada. In fact, we can’t understand them unless we realize that they have a lot to do with how the world is changing. The solutions do not lie just in our own country, then, nor are they entirely in our own hands. And that’s where frustration, a sense of powerlessness, sets in.

It has much to do with what is happening to Canada and many other countries both economically and culturally. The most positive underlying force in any society is trust, something that is born of common understandings about how things will work out and how people will behave and treat one another. But as one of my colleagues observed during a cabinet meeting in Ontario two decades ago, “The water buffalo look at each other very differently when there’s no water.” When the bonds of trust among citizens are weakened, anything can happen, and this is part of what is at work today in societies both rich and poor. If inequalities are created that have no basis in values or understandings that are widely and deeply shared, resentment replaces trust as the operating force. That resentment grows and feeds on itself. Our politicians and political establishment must uphold and protect the people and institutions so integral to this trust, or they risk losing it permanently.

Before exploring the role of widening economic inequalities in eroding trust, let’s start by putting some things in perspective. Canadians are lucky people—our collective standard of living is high, the country is beautiful, life is not terrible for most of us. We are a peaceable kingdom, people feel generally secure, and when questioned about how they’re feeling, most Canadians express satisfaction with their lives and their prospects. We are not in the middle of a deep economic depression, though there are problems in some parts of the country. And yet something is missing; something nags at us saying things could be better.

At the end of the Second World War seventy years ago, Canadians were finally experiencing full employment, and with the return of peace came a period of sustained growth that was marked by a steady increase in the standard of living of average families. The provinces came into their own as education surpassed transportation as the key area of social investment. Quebec had its Quiet Revolution, and this had its parallels in every part of the country, with the evolution of social programs like the Canada Pension Plan, the introduction of universal health care, and the extension of the role of provinces and cities. It was a hopeful time for Canadians. They saw a great future for their children. They had faith in their leaders.

In 1967, Canada celebrated its centennial year by welcoming the world to Montreal at an exposition that showed what an innovative and remarkable country we were. Few of us who remember that experience will forget it—the sense of pride and excitement we felt was tangible.

Ironically, what we didn’t realize at the time was that this was in fact a turning point. It all came down to money. Though our federal government had a balanced budget in 1969, it would not see another one until 1998. Both government spending and taxes increased, but unemployment edged up higher through the 1970s and 1980s. By 1990, with the rise in interest rates and the adjustments brought about by the free trade agreement with the United States, Canada’s largest province, Ontario, faced its most severe economic crunch since the Great Depression.

The challenges of those years really forced Canadians across the political spectrum to come to terms with what had been a national problem twenty-five years in the making. From the early 1970s onwards, all governments, of all stripes, had increased taxes and by and large got away with it because steady inflation concealed the increases. Simply put, when you got a wage increase on January 1, it would hide the underlying tax increase. This changed when high interest rates and a collapsed economy drove inflation out.

When tax increases resulted in lower paycheques, the understandable reaction soon followed. I can well remember a meeting in an auto workers hall in 1991 when I was told, “I voted to tax the rich, but I didn’t think you meant me.” As a skilled worker in an auto plant, the speaker would have been making a good income, but that didn’t produce a strong desire to share it with the government.

The healthier growth that re-emerged in the mid-1990s was good news, as was the decision to use that growth and higher revenues to get budgets back into balance and even pay off some debt with the surpluses that followed. Things were going so well that some commentators even gloated that the business cycle and economic crises were a thing of the past. But several mini jolts (like the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000) and one big mess (the implosion of Wall Street and the financial crisis of 2008 and onwards) should surely have disabused anyone of this idea. Since then, the world economy has returned to a semblance of order, but the underlying unease Canadians still feel should remind us all of two things—the fragility of recoveries and the interconnectedness of the world economy. Look at how Alberta’s economy suddenly shifted from one that outperformed much of the world to one that is struggling with the impact of drastically lower resource prices. The people in Canada’s most oil-rich province now have to adapt to the realities of a global economy that is affected by a number of forces outside of their control. And the political changes we have seen in the last few months are a reflection of those underlying challenges.

The moral origin of the financial crisis of 2008 was, undoubtedly, a greed that knew no limits. Dodgy mortgages bled their way into the world financial system and blew any sense of stability to smithereens. There was no secure ground anywhere, and the crisis flew from the financial sector to all others and from one country to the next. Those countries with more stable banking systems and healthier public account balances held on better than others, but no one was exempt from the impact, and no one would be immune from another outbreak. Following the financial crisis, personal, corporate, and government debts shot back up after declining for fifteen years, and they are now at a point where another blow similar to the one we experienced in 2008–09 would be, quite simply, devastating.

Underpinning all of this upheaval is the age-old question, “How do these changes affect the condition of the people?” The turmoil of the last two decades has revealed the extent to which the forces we sum up in the easy word “globalization” have in fact benefitted those who already control the wealth, the now infamous 1 percent, just as the kleptocracy in Russia and the elite in China have skimmed the cream off the extraordinary riches to be had when a state-owned and -controlled economy suddenly does a 180-degree turn and sells off assets to the bidders with the best connections. Even when some economists tell us that things are going well, with lower unemployment and taxes under control, the general population is not comforted. There is a new label for those whose lives go from paycheque to paycheque—“precarious workers.” The answers and explanations that supposed experts and leaders provide are inconsistent and insufficient. No wonder Canadians feel distrustful and alarmed. No wonder they feel powerless.

Given this unstable economic landscape and the need to reaffirm our social bonds, one would think that there is both an opportunity and a need for politicians to more readily engage a citizenry that is better informed and more accessible than ever before. There is a chance to move past the slogans and the election speeches to engage in meaningful and lasting discourse, dialogue, and debate. But instead, we are greeted with just the opposite. Anyone watching politics in North America and around the world knows that today, parties are instead focused on running permanent campaigns. Politics has become a full-time business in which incessant campaigning trumps real governance.

The speed at which politics takes place is only multiplied by the impact of digital communication and social media. This is widely recognized, and it is not entirely novel—even going back to the French Revolution, one finds popular songs, cartoons, and flyers that proclaimed Marie Antoinette’s alleged excesses both sexual and personal. But in today’s world, with the Twittersphere and the Internet dispensing information more broadly, the lid of respectability is off. Gossip and rumour are grist to the mill, patience is a vice, and while the laws of libel are there for a few hardy (and well-off) souls, they hardly act as much prevention. As a result, the level of public discourse has fallen off badly.

A recent book by Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab, brilliantly describes how big data has been mobilized in an attempt to ensure political success, accurately making the point that a good part of what is going on in these permanent campaigns is an exercise in “creating the electorate.” The question of who votes is as important as how they vote. President Obama’s success in 2008 was all about creating a bigger, younger electorate, because Democrats knew that if they could succeed in doing this, they would be far more likely to win. The Obama campaign successfully employed a combination of volunteer recruitment and enthusiasm, and it paid enormous attention to analytics and systems. It was also an effort bankrolled by unprecedented fund-raising. The 2010 midterm election, however, was a setback for Obama, largely because a discouraged and disheartened electorate stayed away from the polls. In the campaign for the second term, the Obama team realized that unless they grew the electorate back, they would lose the election. Sasha Issenberg describes in detail the analytical effort, and the money, involved in helping to achieve that goal. Savour the language of the new politics from this revealing book:

A July EIP [experiment-informed program] designed to test Obama’s messages aimed particularly at women found that those between 20 and 40 support scores showed the greatest response to his arguments about women’s health and equal-pay measures. Their low support index meant that other indicators of their partisanship pointed strongly to likely Republican attitudes: here was one thing (probably the only thing) that could pull them to Obama. As a result, when Obama unveiled a track of his direct-mail program addressing only women’s issues, it wasn’t to shore up interest among core parts of the Democratic coalition, but to reach over for conservatives who were uniquely cross-pressured on gender concerns.

Today, the electorate is sliced, diced, dissected, and divided to an extent unimaginable even fifteen years ago. All parties are segmenting the electorate and are adopting the tactics of companies selling a packaged product. Consultants share the same enthusiasm for branding a leader or a party as they do for a bar of soap. Occasionally a leader or issue will mobilize the public, but when confronted with the challenge of governing (as President Obama certainly was by the financial crisis he had to meet head-on), often his actions are not able to match the eloquence of his words. Obama had to make difficult choices, and the right-wing media onslaught did not let up for a single minute. Voters started to see him as indecisive. The trouble with pursuing politics as a business is that it has helped to create a cynical, fractured electorate that doesn’t know whom to trust or what to do.

Compounding this is the way in which messaging has become narrow and repetitive, with every activity of the candidate a rote repeat of prepackaged, whitewashed slogans. Defining the opposition in as vicious and dogmatic a way as possible is now more than half the game. The other half is repeat, repeat, repeat the message that has been crafted as your brand. In Parliament, Question Period is now a cycle of sound bites that have usually been written by someone else. Televised debates are rarely real exchanges but rather ships firing volleys at one another amid efforts to get the message out. Meaningful questions are replaced with cynical lectures and prescribed messaging. And until the right questions are posed, satisfactory answers will be in short supply. No wonder Canadians are disenchanted with what they perceive as manufactured debate and stage-managed performances in the House.

The full title of Sasha Issenberg’s book is The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, and therein lies a premise that is problematic. What is missing is that leadership and political engagement are as much an art as a science. They have to do with good organization as much as inspiring serious efforts that bring about change. Pollsters and campaign advisors are in the business of making money, and part of the way they sell their wares is by telling us that they are wizards, that they have access to a secret science. There is no magic, no black box, and no secret science, but the more we think there is, the more we give up our rights and responsibilities to demand more from the political process.

Young voters, in particular, should be the ones shouting loudest for political institutions and representatives that genuinely reflect what they want and need. The steep decline in election participation among younger voters points to a gnawing distrust and disaffection, which will tend to spread more widely as the habits learned at an early age persist through time. If there is no positive memory of the first time voting or becoming politically active in some way, the apathy can only spread.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that driving turnout down, “depressing the vote,” is just what conservative pa...