This column was of necessity written before the election on Monday, so I don’t know who the winner or winners will be. But I am confident that to predict their actual policies going forward you should immediately download their platform directly into your recycle bin. Which does rather raise the question of why politicians create them and why we let them.
To test their predictive value, I invite you to go back and look at platforms from so long ago that they could at least have been used to wrap fish and see how little that was in them got implemented. And while I concede that one problem with party platforms is that they tend to be overtaken by events, there’s something disingenuous in creating them knowing about that problem. And it gets worse.
The obvious trouble with platforms is that they are aspirational, not analytical. They say what a party will do, not how, more precisely, what they believe you will vote for them if they claim to plan to do. Because the aspiration in question is to attract votes, not lay out a sober and possibly disquieting set of concrete measures to be taken if they do. And the better they get at crafting these things, as so often with modern progress, the worse the result.
Even in the early 1990s, Bob Rae’s NDP unexpectedly won an upset victory provincially in Ontario and rushed about confiscating their paper platform from senior bureaucrats with a hasty assurance that they had only put the absurd thing forward because they hadn’t the slightest expectation of winning. And as you may imagine, the subsequent course of their single term in office illustrated the pitfalls involved. As also happens to a great many parties who are less, um, visionary in their pie-in-the-platform that turns into pie-in-the-face.
OK, in part these documents pose as analytical. They say we will do so and so in such and such a manner, apparently offering some kind of assessment of how public policy works as well as how nice it would be if we all got rich and happy without significant effort. But it is troubling to believe they actually believe the world works that way, as it is of course also troubling to think they’re just pretending to.
In considering possible alternatives to this counterproductive habit, and all obviously depend on voters holding politicians to a higher standard of honesty and clarity than we typically do, I was initially inclined to suggest insisting that they tell us how they were going to do things. But such a demand would only put into hyperdrive the existing presentation of pseudo-practicalities.
The current approach, for starters, places a lot of emphasis on producing all these wonderous results by defeating their wretched foes. And to give credit where due, though only a bit because only a bit is due, many partisans really do think the obtuseness, malevolence, or both of their partisan foes is the principal obstacle to achieving many wonderful things quickly at minimal cost.
They aren’t lying. But they also aren’t thinking very hard, and this lack of preparation shows when and if they do win. So how do we try to make it better when, more broadly, asking politicians to tell you how they will achieve all the marvellous stuff they’re telling you they can easily do is only inviting them to deceive themselves, and you, about how such things might be done? Which would leave us stuck where we are now, only more so.
So here’s my new, improved, more practical version of my initial inclination. Which I again emphasize depends on our refusing to accept less from “our” side as well as other parties. It’s to insist that their main election document focus on the obstacles they see to carrying out their plans.
If they really want to assure us that the malice of their foes is the only main problem, fine. Let them, and if you vote for them don’t say you weren’t warned. If they claim there aren’t any real obstacles, ditto. But if they give you a sensible account of what they’d like to do, why and how it will be hard, where similar measures were enacted in other jurisdictions and what unexpected delays, costs, or drawbacks resulted, then you won’t just know a lot more about the ideas.
You’ll know a lot more about the people proposing them. Including whether they have any sort of grounding in the real world of tradeoffs, disappointments, and limits on the possible. Which I’m going boldly to predict would be a lot better than where we are now with whoever did win on the basis of a bunch of promise-like objects not worth the paper they’re no longer printed on.
