Honesty in politics has, for almost all of Canadian history, been somewhat of an oxymoron. If we look closely, as far back as Sir John A., we find that often what was told to the voting public was a smokescreen for reality. It wasn't evident to the electorate in his day how much bribery he had to undertake to attain his goal of uniting this great country by building his dream railway. There are still large tracts of land owned by the two railways, given to them to encourage them to invest in what became a sure thing once they were gifted these lands. Great wealth fell into the pockets of those who accepted these so-called encouragements.
There is evidence throughout the continuum of our history where it seems it was always in our best interest to be misled as to what was actually happening rather than knowing what really was going on. We were told by the great John G. that it was in our best interest to scuttle one of the best aircraft that had ever graced a runway; so that the engineers could be picked up by American companies, thus sending all of the jobs and the future of the industry to foreign nations rather than keeping them here on Canadian soil where they might benefit our own population.
When we look closely there has never been a very large space of time between one scandal or another, in which some of our most trusted people were involved. We don't have to go back very far to see the likes of Brian Mulroney or Grant Devine being brought into question. Now don't get me wrong and think I am being purely partisan in my ranting. There are cases of members of every political stripe who have been responsible. You can look at every group who has been the government in history and find skeletons buried in their closets.
This willingness is not solely owned by politicians either. It has often found its way into organized religion where, to get their followers to see things their way, some leaders have been known to bend reality to fit their own wishes. How often have we seen the filthy rich fire-and-brimstone television preachers brought down in scandal?
This willingness to fit statements to the needs of the moment seems to be a human condition that we fight to overcome but it always seems to rear its ugly head as we are faced with the most basic of human conditions when we are in trouble. We have the choice, when faced with certain conditions that seem dangerous to us, to fight or run for the hills. To me it seems that, when we are faced with troubling situations, it is not an unknown thing for members of this human race to take the easy way out and retreat in the guise of twisting the truth rather than face things head-on and tell everyone what we are really doing.
Is this not what we see when our political leaders refrain from telling us something straight out, hoping we accept a less than honest piece of information that lets them turn tail rather than fight the reality?
Over the last few years we have been told that the Canadian banking system out-performed all others in the world and did so without the need of being shored up, as some of the other leading countries' banks have been, just to stave off collapse. In reality, as reported by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, our big banks have actually had their hand out along with their counterparts south of the border and received somewhere in the neighbourhood of $114 billion in handouts from the Bank of Canada, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Yet our illustrious Prime minister stated, "We have the only banks in the western world that are not looking at bailouts or anything like that."
Now I realize that often these political leaders feel that, if they were to reveal the actuality, there could be negative effects where the populous would start digging in to the point where our economy would collapse. Thus they feel they have served us by keeping the truth from us and, in essence, protecting us from ourselves. The same has often been the goal of those religious leaders who felt they were keeping us from harm.
Thus comes the great question: do we give our leaders the right to decide what we are or are not capable of or are they taking a liberty that we have not granted them? Does the taking of such liberties go against the principles of democracy and fit more into those espoused by fascism or communism?
Quote: "It seems irony that the only time that any one political group has a full grasp on honesty and truth is when it is in opposition." Unknown
