2010-04-16

Honestly...



I hate rainy days. And we coyotes find that honesty as defined by our elected representatives is a strange thing indeed.

Current events suggest that the current Prime Minister practices a form of petty-cash honesty - scrupulous about accounting for pennies, nickel(back)s and dimes, in ways that firmly address the letter of election promises to bring accountability back to government, but that are infinitely greasier on larger matters of ethics. Petty-cash honesty can be way to feel virtuous while more problematic pathologies of the soul need addressing.

A recently gauche minister was turfed because she is accused - but not proven - of applying her publicly-elected mitts to encourage a little private gain in the family. It's close enough to the kind of thing that helped the PCs deep-six Liberals and gain power, that the PM calculated that he had to cut her loose, or look even more like a cynical hair-splitter than he already does. Yet, nickel and dime stuff in the end.

In Ottawa's political bubbleworld, most big-picture statements made during elections seem to be covered by a blanket equivalent of crossed fingers behind the back. Politicians who spout 'em, believe them only as far as they need to to sell the message. Once asses are snuggled into seats in the House, neither they, nor any the other gamesters sitting across the aisle, expect to be held to such promises.

Cynical as hell, yeah, but it certainly helps a poor dumb canine to understand why a government elected on broad promises of openness and accountability can merrily strangle both, while the PMO's chief of staff mouths black-is-white platitudes about the great job it's doing on the file.

And the question of whether Cabinet, or ministers, condoned or encouraged the torture of human beings in Afghanistan, was dismissed with the suggestion that Canadians don't care about it. "Canadians" in this case probably means the Conservative's core voters. Problematically, I am left to conclude that the party's definition of "human beings" may mean the same exclusive group.

So even if the nickels and dimes in petty cash add up so far, it doesn't follow that a government is intellectually honest - or ethical.

And thinking about it, I kinda wonder if maybe the current government has as much problem with the "intellectual" part as it does with honesty. Shudder. We coyotes would do well to save that one for an entirely different rainy day, I think...

4 comments:

Milan said...

There are many reasons to be depressed and upset about the Afghanistan torture issue.

One of them is that the opposition parties making all this stink don't actually care about preventing detainees from being tortured. They aren't putting forward motions to stop detainee transfers, or to do anything else that would actually help people who face an acute risk of being tortured by Afghan authorities today.

Rather, they are trying to get their hands on whatever old documents they think will embarrass the government most. If they find some and get a bump in the polls, so much the better. What they certainly will not do - even if they do get documentary evidence that the government violated the international laws of war - is actually seek to have anyone prosecuted as a war criminal. Because that's just too politically risky (as the behaviour of the Obama administration has shown).

In short, the opposition parties don't care about the welfare of detainees or the enforcement of international law. They just want to score cheap points.

The same dynamic exists with climate change. They pass tough-looking laws when they aren't actually in a position to have any effect. When they are actually in power, they are just as spineless in the face of opposition from status quo actors (oil sands companies, asbestos miners, etc) and just as happy to set targets for 2050 with no plan for serious implementation today.

coyote said...

The game theory of politics...?

zoom said...

It's so depressing...

Helena Guergis's Indiscriminate Libido said...

You is one especially canny coyote, m'thinks...