Tag Archives: Stephen Harper

Which Lie Do You Buy?

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Politicians are all liars.

If there’s a bigger cop-out for political apathy, I can’t think of one off the top of my head. It brushes with a broad stroke and enables those pronouncing such a trite sentiment to walk away with an unearned sense of superiority. I would deign to participate in the proceedings if those involved weren’t so contemptibly untruthful.

More insidiously, it gives cover to vote for those we know are determined to act on our worst, self-interested instincts. When they do once being elected, we look shocked, throw up our hands and exclaim, what are you gonna do? Who knew they were going to cut [fill in the blank] and ban [fill in the blank]? They’re all liars.

It all comes full circle as opportunistic politicians then do only what an easily cynical electorate expects them to do: lie. Tell us what we want to hear with a wink and a nod and then unfurl an unspoken agenda, much to our satisfaction and mock dismay. What are you gonna do? They’re all liars.

So we had a recent federal election that, to hear tell it, nobody really wanted and had nothing to do with a minority government in contempt of parliament. There’s an upcoming provincial election in the fall that looks as if it’s going to be fought on the flimsiest of grounds. A tax mad incumbent who’s buried the province under a sea of red tape, making it uncompetitive and on the road to ruin. Never mind that indications point to a more upbeat outlook. A slow if unsteady climb from the biggest economic downturn in over 80 years. The Taxman Cometh! Oogly-boogly!

And of course, there was last year’s municipal election in Toronto, chock full of pithy phrases, sleights of hand and misdirection. “Stop The Gravy Train.” “Respect For Taxpayers.” “City Hall Does Not Have A Revenue Problem. It Has A Spending Problem.”

Less than a year later, turns out much of that was — how to phrase it gently? – complete and utter shit. Most of then Councillor Rob Ford’s opponents for mayor said exactly that on the campaign trail. His numbers didn’t add up. His anecdotal evidence of waste and profligacy was nothing more than that, anecdotal. There was no way possible for him to cut taxes without cutting services.

But the soon-to-be next mayor of Toronto and his self-proclaimed Nation plugged their ears and yelled la-la-la-la-la-la, unconvinced. Waste would be found. Easy. Taxes could be cut. Easy. No services would be cut. Guaranteed.

Quickly however, ‘no services’ became no major services’ and now, as we head into the budget battles in the fall Everything. Is. On. The. Table. Exactly like many of those Ford defeated last October said it would be. As Edward Keenan pointed out in his Grid article last week, the KPMG core services review report ultimately showed what the previous mayor, David Miller, and his supporters had said all along. There wasn’t a whole lot of gravy at City Hall. Toronto was being run pretty darn efficiently and the major cuts that were available to Mayor Ford weren’t going to amount to a hill of beans money wise.

In short, the entire campaign platform that propelled Rob Ford into the mayor’s office was predicated on one whoppingly big faulty premise, let’s call it. All the waste he promised to find easy, well, wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, it’d be a stretch to call most of it waste at all. No matter how much the generously paid consultants at KPMG tired to frame it otherwise, the fact of the matter is candidate Rob Ford was wrong.

A more humble or intellectually accommodating person would stand back, admit the error of his ways and proceed to re-evaluate his thinking. New information. Recalibrate. That’s generally how a species successfully adapts.

That is not our mayor’s style, choosing instead to just bull on, spouting even more nonsense and claptrap. As Mr. Keenan noted Tuesday in The Grid, the mayor’s on something of a ‘truthiness’ whistle stop tour, telling AM radio talk show listeners that labour make up 80% of the city’s costs. Ummm, actually no, Mr. Mayor. It’s more like 48%. Maybe if he’d said 84%, we might think he had a brain fart and mistakenly flipped digits.

Not to outdone on the nosestretcher scale, the mayor’s brother and apparent stunt double in mendacity, Councillor Doug Ford, blurted out that his neighbourhood had more libraries than Tim Hortons. As if that would be a bad thing. As if that was an indication that we were spending too much money on libraries. As if…

It doesn’t matter because it turns out not to be the case. Not even close. “We have more libraries per person than any other city in the world,” Councillor Ford blustered on. Wrong again, Doug. We don’t. You’re just spouting out sound bytes that have no basis in reality. Infecting discourse with a contagion of half-truths and not even close to half-truths.

What kind of politician, a public servant, would do that?

One whose arguments can’t be won on facts and reason. On equal footing, they’re dead to rights, as is often the case when you watch them at work during debates at council. Make shit up because it can’t be contested since it’s not based on anything real or actual. Like punching the wind.

Moreover, a constant misstating of facts fills the whole space with an air of deceit and dishonesty. Sure, I may be lying but so is everyone else. That’s what politicians do.

All politicians lie.

A lie built on lies.

And we let them get away with it because it lets us off the hook. Why bother if nobody’s telling the truth? A pox on all your houses.

If we’re lied to by our elected officials, it’s because we let them lie to us. We encourage them to lie so that we don’t have to do the heavy lifting of governing. We’re lying to ourselves if we think otherwise.

— honest as the day is longingly submitted by Cityslikr

On The Road To Metropolis

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Mission Accomplished.

In less than two generations, conservative “thinkers” and politicians have succeeded in their undertaking of denigrating and vilifying the notion of government as a force for good. It can’t help, only hinder. The best form of governance is less governance. As St. Ronnie intoned (and everybody say it along with me), government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.

So it is that we have arrived at a spot in history where the eminence grise of Canadian conservative thought, Preston Manning (which should say a lot about the sad sack state of conservative thought), is able to boast that Canadians are not looking to governments for grand visions or designs for society. “Managerial Conservatism” is now the buzzword we should all rally around. Competence replacing edifying or lofty in the expectations we now look for in our elected representatives.It’s all about lowering the bar which makes it more palatable when the likes of George W. Bush, Stephen Harper and Rob Ford assume the mantle of office. Governments can’t do anything positive for us, so why elect anyone who claims they can? It’s a virus that has fully infected non-conservative parties and politicians as well. Dumb down their rhetoric. Eliminate any thoughts of grand visions or designs they might have. We don’t want leaders. We want managers. Bad managers are even preferred to those wanting to impose their dreamy dreams upon us.

With the advent of managers business think invariably displaces political discourse. It’s all about finding efficiencies, value for dollars, bangs for you bucks. We become taxpayers rather than citizens. Customers, clients and stakeholders. In fact, it’s much worse. We’re little more than widgets to the minds of manager/politicians. (Oh, where has our veneration for warrior-poets gone?)

Witness the insidious creep of some icky, sci-fi/Scientology sounding Lean Six Sigma into our public sphere. Down in the States, it’s claiming the brains of various GOP presidential candidates. Lean Six Sigma is already in practice even closer to home in Erie County, New York where County Executive Chris Collins has credited the system with aiding him in slashing jobs. Our very own budget chief, Michael Del Grande, also seems to be brushing up on his knowledge base as he expensed two books on the subject earlier this year.

While I don’t expect our modern political leaders to be well versed in their Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Tocqueville, it distresses me that they might be filling their hearts and minds with such soulless ideas as these:

  • Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes.
  • Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (cost reduction or profit increase).
  • The term Six Sigma originated from terminology associated with manufacturing, specifically terms associated with statistical modeling of manufacturing processes.
  • In Six Sigma, a defect is defined as any process output that does not meet customer specifications, or that could lead to creating an output that does not meet customer specifications.
  • Like its predecessors, Six Sigma doctrine asserts that:
  • Continuous efforts to achieve stable and predictable process results (i.e., reduce process variation) are of vital importance to business success.

It’s all about things and processes not people. Perfectly acceptable if you’re talking about manufacturing products but how does it align with governing society? It feels like we’re on the road to Metropolis. All of us replaceable parts, judged and viewed not by our merits or character but by our lack of defects. If our elected leaders are endeavouring to be nothing more than our managers, doesn’t that make us simply staff or the hired help?

If a country or a city no longer aspires to grand visions or designs, what’s there left to do? The answer that immediately springs to my mind is: lead lives of quiet desperation. That may be what managers want from their employees but it hardly seems like something leaders should have us aspire to. And that certainly shouldn’t be the quality we’re looking for in our leaders.

— desperately submitted by Urban Sophisticat

Unreason To Believe

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We’re trying a new approach here in an attempt to fall in line with a wider swath of our fellow electorate. Clearly we are out of step. So very, very out of step.

Our goal is to stop over-analyzing things. Maybe stop analyzing everything altogether. It only leads to despondency and heavy drinking. Let’s just start pretending to take what our politicians tell us at face value. We know they’re all lying to us, so let’s go with the lies we find most agreeable and beneficial to us. That way, when they fail to deliver, it justifies our anger and disillusionment with the entire system. The politicians are the problem not us.

Cut taxes without cutting services? We like it. Stability and non-accountability above compromise and cooperation? Hells yeah! Putting a majority government in place enables us not to have to think about federal politics again for another 4 years or so. That’s what politics is all about, isn’t it? Divesting ourselves of any and all responsibility.

We’ll also try our best to pay attention to what politicians who pander to our worst instincts have to say about their opponents and we’ll poo-poo what these duly smeared politicians say about any sort of ‘hidden agenda’. That’s just conspiracy minded, we’ll tell them. Besides, what do you know? You once lived outside of the country, didn’t you? Let’s set aside policy and platforms for personality. I’m only going to vote for someone I’d like to have a beer with. It’s a whole lot easier that way.

So we’re going to begin by sharing the joy our mayor and his brother have expressed with the outcome of Monday’s federal election. Finally. After nearly 25 years in exile, we have Conservatives MPs in 416 Toronto. The Liberal Fortress GTA has been breached and this can only mean good things for the city and region.

After years of being neglected and taken for granted by successive Liberal governments in Ottawa, left to our own devices to build transit, affordable housing and upgrade infrastructure, we have elected a party that will listen to our needs and set those things right. It’s true. Technically speaking, the Conservatives have been in power for 5 years now and haven’t really ever talked about any of that except for stimulus spending that the dreaded near-coalition forced them into when the world’s economy was heading off the cliff in 2008.

But you see, their hands were tied in a minority situation. Now freed from those merciless bonds, not with a little help from Toronto and the GTA, they can finally be themselves which, I think, if you didn’t look too closely at how they’ve operated as a government, could be seen as magnanimous. Caring, accommodating, law-abiding and magnanimous.

And since our mayor and his brain trust helped push them over the top, we should expect a little payback in return. Only Liberals ignore those who vote for them. While Conservatives focus mostly on their enemies, they do know who their friends are and reward them accordingly.

What from the mayor’s wish list should we look to be granted first? And by ‘wish list’, I mean not an actual list of priorities that Mayor Ford set down early on in the campaign for the federal politicians to agree or disagree with. That would be getting involved, politically speaking. The mayor didn’t want to get involved. At least, until he publicly endorsed the Conservatives and started sending out robo-calls to voters in various 416 ridings. But now that he’s rolled the dice and come up 7s, what would he wish for if he had any wishes?

There’s money for subways through P3s. So the mayor can finally administer the death blow to Transit City. Check that one off the list. Then there’s… there’s…

For this to work, we’re going to have to ignore the fact that all throughout last year’s municipal campaign, then candidate Rob Ford told us that the city didn’t have a revenue problem. It was all about over-spending and profligate waste. So it makes it a little awkward to go to the federal government now, cap in hand as the mayor referred to it when someone else was doing it, and ask for money that the mayor claims we don’t need.

The difference is, we’re coming at this from a position of strength now. Not only did we help give the Conservatives a majority government, so they owe us, but we don’t really need the money in the first place. If we did, the mayor and his people at City Hall wouldn’t have cut and frozen taxes. So let’s look at it more as a Demand rather than Wish List. We are in the driver’s seat. All it took was electing government MPs. Conservative government MPs. Conservative majority government MPs.

Who knew life could be this simple and easy? Aside from the 40% of voters who cast Conservative ballots on Monday. They’re clearly on to something. Set aside reason and logic and things become very clear, very straight-forward. It’s what we’re all looking for in the long run, isn’t it?

— new me-ly submitted by Cityslikr