Common sense and nonsense

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/04/2024 (537 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Almost daily now, leader of the official Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, expands his notion of the latest Conservative party “common sense” platform. In doing so, he virtually annihilates any notions of common sense that have existed to this point.

The “Common Sense” movement in the England and the U.S. has become so familiar as to be frighteningly unthinking and boring, a normal part of the political landscape. Unfortunately, it is just this banality — lack of critique, novelty, and imagination — which the common-sensers like Poilievre are exploiting as in “don’t worry, nothing scary or out-of-the ordinary going on here.”

Although it would be easy to impute personal motives to Poilievre’s pronouncements, it is more helpful to critique his public stances on some key issues, declarations which he wants the Canadian electorate to accept as common sense, and in their interest. Too numerous to address briefly, there are some familiar to all which appear the most blatant and obvious.

“Axe the Tax” and “Spike the Hike,” negative slogans which gloss over, ignore or make partisan political a serious climate crisis, and deny the reality of global warming by stalling any meaningful, constructive and collective problem-solving. “Conservatives will approve pipelines and oilsands mines.” How are anti-environmental degradation concerns simply a left-wing scam? Like it or not, the carbon tax is more than a technical solution to a human-created problem, it tries to accomplish something not technologically available, an appeal to our moral consciousness and a change of destructive habits and lifestyles.

“The country is broken” is a problematic claim on several levels. Canada is not a “failed state” by any definition. It, I might remind us, in addition to being a network of systems, is us. For some people, and in some instances, what we are doing the way we are doing things is not serving them well. The homeless and the poor, some recent immigrants, Indigenous Peoples, the targets of hate — particularly Muslims and Jews — among others could claim the country is failing them. But those are not the people who Poilievre is talking to — he’s usually talking economic hardship to audiences who have no economic right to complain.

Consider taking advice and direction from the “common people” instead of so-called scientific experts. Who are these common people that can speak knowledgably and helpfully about complex matters of science of climatology and medicine of epidemics? How common would they be if they could? While politically this may play well as in “I’m just like you and one of you but I, unlike the others, can save you,” it’s hard to imagine this as more than the crudest, cruellest and most deceitful ploy to play on people’s discomforts, uncertainties, and fears.

Totalitarian “Trudeau” has supposedly destroyed the economy, taxed us into poverty, been too generous with Indigenous support and international aid, not met NATO obligations, kowtowed to the Bank of Canada, used the CBC for political support — the list of his mean-spirited control over Canadians seemingly has no limits. Is there no recognition that this paints not Trudeau in so much of a bad light as it does the rest of us, as it makes passive subjects and not active citizens out of the rest of us? If Trudeau actually was a modern-day dictator, Poilievre would be in prison.

If we add to this “common sense” rhetoric the promise to “silence gender ideology,” which interprets into denying trans-gender youth access to health services, reducing Indigenous relationships to “economic reconciliation” (a very scary prospect that looks like reducing funding), and getting “tough on crime,” an overused and meaningless trope, then the term ignores the most important aspect of the term “common,” which is what we should have in common, our humanity.

A politics which relies on simple answers to complex problems, which stands against instead of with, and which takes it cues from fear, anxiety, anger, and hatred is neither helpful nor sustainable. It undermines empathy, civility, and the possibilities of human solidarity — the very ideals which make democracy even thinkable and possible.

Further, a common sense which is decoupled from truth and reality denying logic and reason, that rests upon personal attacks as justification, and which promotes discrimination and exclusion is dangerous, pernicious nonsense and a threat to our humanity. It would be in our interests to reject it outright, openly, immediately, and on every possible occasion.

To think we’re going to elect this Poilievre as our next prime minister, as the pollsters suggest, makes no sense at all.

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.