Arguable: the toniest weasel word in politics

"Argument" is the lifeblood of democracy and science. However, the adjective "arguable" and the pleasing-to-the-ear adverb "arguably" can poison both.

Each qualifier flashes green and simultaneously flashes red: What I’m about to say may be plausible (or implausible), reasoned (or arbitrary).

English-speaking politicians already prone to indirection have taken up both with glee. They can utter crude, paranoid, and wild ideas without sounding like populists or American Republicans. In a speech, the words imply deliberation and perspective and can invite you to put down your guard and go along.

For brevity, for truth — and more productive argument — let’s cough every time an office-seeker or an incumbent slides one in front of a seemingly bold declarative sentence.

We already have "Let’s be clear" and "Frankly" in our BS detector kits — their aim is to skirt messy facts and give pretested platitudes an air of audacity and spontaneity. 

Even Canada’s Green Party leader Elizabeth May can make mischief, showing us how the word "arguable" permits a speaker to be utterly extravagant, reportable, and worthy of scholarly attention at the same time. Here’s the way the McGillREPORTER publication headlined her lecture to an audience of truth-seekers last week at that distinguished Montreal university:

“’It’s arguable that we now live in a dictatorship, punctuated by manipulated elections,’ says Elizabeth May.”

If the weather hadn’t turned bad again, I’d let it pass. Certainly, taking objection to portentous utterances by Elizabeth May isn’t something even-tempered Canadians normally risk. Nevertheless, May offers a timely reminder: Idealism and imprecision can be dangerous helpmates.

In an interview after her lecture, she doubled-down, enumerating the “symptoms” of our dictatorial habitat: low voter turnout, a “less than vital” Fourth Estate, media concentration, public apathy and cynicism, excessive power in the PMO, the underutilization of Members of Parliament, and too much power in the hands of unelected partisan officials.

Historically, constitutionally, culturally, and terminologically, her characterization of our national governance is farfetched and, more importantly, unreasonable — whether we like or loathe Stephen Harper. Indeed, she’d have been more credible if she’d got personal about the behavior of Stephen Harper, rather than deprecated our representative democracy.

May would like to convince Canadians to support proportional representation; others favor preferential ballots, formal recall procedures, or the status quo. I’d like an elected Senate. All of us want to reform our political system. However, we’re not — even in our dreams — freedom fighters opposing a “dictatorship.”

The worrisome bits about the PMO and her complaints about journalism and young people are old hat and circumstantial. They are the things recent losers say about recent winners, the unpersuasive about the more persuasive.

Her modish concerns go back to the '60s and '70s. (I used to ghost indignant speeches for Progressive Conservative backbenchers about closure rules, charisma, shallow television news, and Pierre Trudeau’s “airtight helm”.) Harper’s majority “dictatorship” of 2011 was elected by a higher turnout of voters than was Chretien’s third majority “dictatorship” of 2000. And today’s charismatic politician is still considerable distant from the reins of power.

Today’s “dictatorship” has as many excellent reasons to worry about losing the next election as any other incumbent in Canada’s past and in any democracy on the globe today that, conceivably, meets May’s standards. Further, on a weekly basis, Harper’s PMO must be prepared to justify its actions and public standing to a majority of Members of Parliament, if not Elizabeth May, and it must attempt to govern according to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — to the satisfaction of an independent Supreme Court.

Arguably a dictatorship? Please.

Org Charts and Green Politics

Even rumor of another executive order from the White House raises $millions in small donations from paranoids on the American right. In Canada, the paranoids are unarmed, still believe in positive government, and are highly aroused by new org charts.

Former public servant and Green Party leader Elizabeth May put on a vivid display of this Canadian variety this past Tuesday.

In the Globe and Mail, over the alarming headline “Environment department on chopping block, May says,” Gloria Galloway reports:

“Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says senior sources who would lose their jobs if they went public have told her that the Conservative government is planning to eliminate the federal environment department and merge any remaining functions with Natural Resources Canada. The government categorically denied the suggestion.”

Outside the House of Commons, May repeated that she believed that the threat was “credible” and emphasized that she’d been warned about the approaching elimination of Canada’s Ministry of Environment by “multiple and well-connected sources.”

In Question Period, Stephen Harper only suggested that she was misinformed. The cold bastard didn’t bother to get personal or complain that May had lost her avowed attachment to "evidence-based" politics.

Elizabeth May and certainly Ms. Galloway should know that farfetched rumors move in packs, at lightning speed, amongst the well connected. It’s court courtesy.

Even imagining that Harper’s government would want to strip this highly educated and self-consciously green country of its flagship environment ministry; even if he thought he could sell streamlining staff overheads by creating, say, one Ministry of Sustainable Development—and wanted to spend time and political capital trying—the argument that Harper’s new organization would crush the greens is nonsense.

Let’s pretend they merge, and then let the numbers help us figure out who is the big fish and who’d be eaten:

According to Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the brutish Ministry of Natural Resources has 5,520 full-time employees while the fair maiden Ministry of Environment has 5,774. Those are the numbers for fiscal year 2012-2013—after 7 years of budget-making by Harper and his bean counters.

This is surely, a pretty "even Stephen" proposition that, on the face of it, couldn’t swallow up the bureaucratic culture or clout of either former ministry.

Further, a merger wouldn’t make it any easier for an incompetent government to escape the wrath of environmentalists or energy interests.

Conflicts between professionals and energy and environment priorities would carry on. Complex and contentious decision-making would continue to frustrate the Prime Minister and provide stories and great leaks to good journalists.

The change would primarily be felt internally. Cabinet meetings would feel smaller, and one less minister would be fighting in front of the Prime Minister. The merged bureaucracy would reach more compromises within the bureaucracy, without burdening the Cabinet with their differences. Briefing books, policy papers, planning meeting, briefings with the minister all would be coordinated to encourage agreement, order, and civility. Where officials couldn’t agree, one side would usually stand down and let the other "own" the file.

The desire to get to peaceful decisions, with less fighting at the top, does lead premiers and prime ministers to try bureaucratic mergers. Possibly, Elizabeth May picked up on that sentiment—and simply couldn’t resist assigning pitch-black motives to Stephen Harper.

In pursuit of more rational and smoother decision-making, energy and environment ministries have been merged before. In fact, May’s most experienced fellow opposition leader, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae, did just that when he merged the Ontario ministries of Energy and Environment in the early 90s.

(Full disclosure: I was one of the Assistant Deputy Ministers assigned to make it work. The environment side of the new ministry was about 10 times bigger than the energy side. But because of the demands of politics, the legislature, the press, stakeholders, and unscheduled economic and environmental problems, the minister and the Rae Government had to give each side roughly equal time.)

Your turn Green Party?

“Third parties are like bees,” the intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1955. “Once they have stung, they die.” It’s an aphorism that aptly describes the anti-slavery and anti-immigrant parties of the mid-nineteenth century, the Populists and Progressives who ushered out the Gilded Age, as well as more recent third-party standard bearers, from George Wallace to Ross Perot. All of these movements and figures influenced American politics dramatically, before fading away and leaving the basic two-party duopoly intact.”

—Ross Douthat in the New York Times, May 15, 2012

Click on: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/the-third-party-fantasy/  

With the collapse of minority government and a minority government’s future guarantor—proportional representation—the national Green Party of Canada has lost any credible prospect of becoming a significant ongoing influence in Canadian politics. It can’t intimidate a majority government. Furthermore, whenever the public is aroused, the Green’s priority concern—the environment—can be easily taken up as a priority by existing political parties, on both the left and the right.

However, it still has a working stinger. And it should use it now. The configuration and leadership of Canada’s opposition forces—the alternative Canadian government—will be resolved over the next year.

Presently, with 3% of the vote, meaningful support in British Columbia, one excellent communicator in the House of Commons, and a nice middle-class brand, it can make a strategic difference: either by joining Thomas Muclair and the New Democrats or by joining the Liberal life-raft in the center.

The Green Party would be a prize for either potential suitor. Mulcair’s prospects in BC and his image as a centrist builder would be enhanced. Joining the Liberals could literally keep them alive long enough for further room in the center to open up.

You could object: This isn’t America! Okay, but don’t try to say that we’re more complicated, that we’re too prickly to express ourselves within two national political parties. There is no compelling evidence that Canadian voters or their political elites want or need a multiparty political system to articulate changing national values and challenges. 

Regional parties do have a legitimate, if temporary, place in the political market place. That’s why, now and then, we have minority governments. Regional grievances, however, are hardly the core business of the Green Party.

Unless a decent majority of Greens soon decides whom they want to support, the Green Party will fade away without ever being a serious nuisance, let alone a game-changer. That would be a sad fate for an institution founded on the principals of sustainable development.

Why not a two-party democracy in Canada?

With the resurgence of the right in the West and the re-release of the Titanic in theaters everywhere, Canadian progressives—in the Liberal Party, especially—are asking: must we live through years and years of further internal and electoral attrition before Canada’s center left unites?

What are they waiting for? They say that they believe that 60% of the people want Harper out for their kind of politics. Isn’t 60% already enough of a market to unite their ambitions?

Sure, it might be easier in the future to set aside their personal differences when Harper gets even more hateful. But between us: isn’t it clear by now that Harper is trying to make Ottawa a less passionate place? And he isn’t even very inflammatory about that.

Good timing is introduced as an adult argument by those who tell others to sit still. It often disguises fear and usually inflates the procrastinator’s ability to control events.

Echoing loyalist in the Liberal Party, the Toronto Star’s columnist Tim Harper pronounced:

“Any move to unite the left will have to wait until Canadians pronounce one more time at the ballot box.”

Click on: www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1163137--tim-harper-ndp-and-liberals-need-to-duke-it-out-one-more-time

Tim Harper is repeating, in servile terms, a desperate Toronto Liberal prayer: the people of Canada will come back to us, humble the NDP in the next election, and thereby give us our rightful place in any two-party negotiation, if any kind of accommodation is necessary to get back into power.

Two problems.

The people don’t pronounce. The next election will not make tough decisions easier for leaders or procrastinators. It could, however, take one option away from our fearful federal Liberals.

The Liberal Party could wake up after the next election further marginalized. As scenarios go, either a shaky New Democrat Government (with the support of the Greens, before or after the election) or a shaky Conservative government could be the next step on the way to a two-party, left-right parliament.

Conceivably, Canada could end up with a two-party system before the incredible intellectual capital of the Liberal Party comes to the table.