Time to close the road to playing ignorant

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/10/2023 (1073 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a question asked so often it has long been mundane: do politicians really mean what they say?

To many, the answer is a resounding “no.” More generous spirits may want to dismiss that as common cynicism. Politicians are at least theoretically supposed to seek and hold office according to their deeply held convictions and their beliefs about what will make their country, province, or municipality a better place.

Such a pity then that Manitobans have a great recent example that this is not always the case.

Earlier this week, in an interview with the CBC, outgoing Manitoba premier Heather Stefanson expressed regret — sort of — over her party’s campaign ads which vowed not to search the landfill for the remains of slain Indigenous women. She claimed the campaign’s tone left her “a little uncomfortable.” She also claimed to not have been present for every meeting and that some decisions were made without her.

Her apology was hardly an apology. She didn’t say she was sorry she offended the sensibilities of so many Manitobans and hurt others. She was sorry they were offended and hurt.

By publicly fidgeting about her campaign after the fact, Stefanson is trying to act as though she had little control over her party’s campaign, despite being the sitting premier and the party’s leader. It’s nonsense. It was her campaign that vowed to “stand firm” over the landfill search. Stefanson knew her party was making “parental rights” a pillar of the campaign. It was she who declared to striking labourers her answer “has to be no.”

She was not ignorant and if her distaste was so great she had every ability to push back against those choices, if not in the moment then afterward.

Stefanson has also received credit for her gracious concession speech to Premier-elect Wab Kinew. But she shouldn’t. It was Stefanson’s campaign that pulled out all the stops to drag Kinew and his party through the mud, invoking his past run-ins with the justice system at every opportunity. There appear to be two Stefansons. Will the real one please stand up?

It would be dishonest to say this trait in politicians is solely their creation. It isn’t. It’s the product of a political culture — of which the media are a part.

Be it on the campaign or just during the day-to-day of government, politicians are often questioned and evaluated in game-ified terms. “How will X strategy pay off? Why is Party Y courting this base? Let’s take a look at the pledge that Party Z is hoping will win it support from…” and so on. This is not the way we talk about people who really believe in what they’re saying, and who would say it even if it received no support. This is the way we talk about players in a game.

This rhetoric has many consequences. It contributes to the reduction of politics to mere spectacle, which cheapens its importance to people’s lives and discourages both politicians and voters from taking government seriously.

More than that, it allows for a dangerous disconnect to exist between the politician and their stated positions.

Politicians have long enjoyed a safe distance between themselves and the behaviour of their campaign managers, their communications offices and their speechwriters. But it’s time for that to end. No one — not pundits, analysts, or journalists — should entertain for a moment that a political leader can be one person on the last day of a campaign and a completely different one the first day after it ends.

Better to act as if one thing is true: if they said it, they meant it. And if it stinks, it should stick.