‘Truthiness’ fails at election time

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This article was published 18/09/2015 (3685 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Nothing brings out the lies — and the liars who tell them — more than political campaigns.

Parties and their flacks live in a world where things don’t have to be true, they just have to plausible. Or a good enough sound bite that people are likely to remember, without bothering to look up whether it’s true.

It makes it very hard for voters to truly understand what is happening.

Sometimes the lies are blatant, like when Conservative Leader Stephen Harper continues to insist Canada accepts more refugees per capita than anywhere else in the world. It is simply not true.

In fact, Canada is 41st in the world when it comes to the number of refugees here per capita. We let in about one refugee for every 4,000 people; Germany this year will accept 40 times as many.

So Harper can keep saying it, but that will not make it any more true.

Nor is it true Harper is the only prime minister to have been in power over two recessions, no matter how many times NDP Leader Tom Mulcair tosses out the quip. In fact, Harper is one of at least three prime ministers with that distinction (or as many as five depending on which PM you credit for years in which there was a change of power).

Other times, the lies are more a stretch of the truth. Such as when Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said “a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes.”

There is evidence some wealthier Canadians use small businesses as a way to split income and lower their personal tax burden, but there is no evidence it is “large percentage” of small businesses that do this.

Then there are the lies the parties all tell about their opponents.

The ones where Harper says the NDP and the Liberals would scrap pension splitting for seniors even though both have pledged to maintain it.

Or the ones where Mulcair claims Harper spent $1 billion over the last 10 years fighting First Nations in court. The Free Press knocked that claim down to size (it’s closer to $300 million) after perusing the public accounts documents for 15 minutes.

Or the claims from Trudeau we are in a deficit situation right now, when there is no evidence to prove that. The economy is weak and there certainly are experts, the Parliamentary Budget Officer among them, who believe we won’t be able to balance this year’s books with current economic growth predictions. But it’s still not technically true. You simply can’t claim we are running a deficit when there are six months left in the fiscal year, and the government posted a $5-billion surplus in the first quarter.

The sad truth is elections often turn on who is able to win the scare-tactics game.

In 2004, Paul Martin was able to pull victory out of a race he was losing because he convinced Canadians Harper was going to privatize health care and reopen the abortion debate.

Provincially, in 2011, Premier Greg Selinger convinced Manitobans to keep him in power by painting then-Tory leader Hugh McFadyen as too big a risk, the same way Gary Doer did four years earlier. To hear Doer, McFadyen was going to privatize Manitoba Hydro. It didn’t matter that the Tories never said anything of the sort.

And Harper himself managed to secure his longed-for majority four years ago by convincing Canadians then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff “didn’t come back for you.” He was in it for himself, the Conservatives said, and managed to turn Ignatieff’s global experience and high educational attainments into a negative.

There are lots of efforts made to fact-check claims and lots of times claims are difficult to explain because their “truthiness” depends on what yardstick is used. It’s why Harper can boast about 1.3 million new jobs since the “height” of the last recession, while opponents can also claim he has one of the worst job-creation records in the G7 and fewer people are working now than in 2008.

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One would like to believe the prime minister, and those running for the job, wouldn’t look us square in the face and lie.

One would simply be wrong.

Mia Rabson is the Free Press parliamentary bureau chief.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @mrabson