As our government becomes more and more polarized, what can we do to ensure that facts and data hold out?
I’m not suggesting that lying should be illegal (in fact, it’s often unintentional), but when an MPs statement can later be proven to be false, shouldn’t they be forced to publicly apologize?
The truth shouldn’t be political.
Punishing the breaking of election promises would be a start. Those are not ambiguous or unintentional, and it should be punishable as a breach of contract.
Sometimes circumstances change and you can’t always follow through on your election promises. Imagine if someone had promised to run a balanced budget just before COVID. If they couldn’t spend money due to their promise, we wouldn’t get things like CERB, which would be much worse than breaking that promise.
In an ideal world, breaking an election promise would be political suicide so it just wouldn’t happen, but we’ve already seen that voters don’t care enough, and 4-5 years is a long time to run wild without any repercussions.
We need a way to hold politicians responsible, but making it illegal to break an election promise is probably not a good idea.
Then they should not make (what would then be) a legally binding promise. There should be a way that a claim can be made into a commitment with consequences, regardless of why it was broken. Sure, not every claim can be handled that way, but the option should exist.
Then you just get parties who don’t promise anything.
Look at Doug Ford’s 2018 election platform. Buck a beer and… nothing else. Look at the platforms for everyone who ran in your municipal election. I don’t know where you live, but if it’s anywhere like the cities I’ve lived in, the candidates don’t really have a platform, but occasionally make vague statements like “I’m would like to address issues with housing” or “we should do something about the homelessness problem”.
If every politician is given the choice between “vague statements that don’t mean anything” or “legal consequences if you promise to do this thing that you actually want to do but circumstances change and you can’t do it”, they’re going to go with “vague statements” every time.
Yes, if this is what the electorate wants, they should present the contract and get the candidate to sign it before election night.
I think you’ll find the electorate doesn’t actually want that, though. The incumbent maybe has sufficient information to present an election promise, assuming they can implement it in the first few days before the state of the world has moved on, but the other candidates most certainly do not. Why would you want a politician making decisions before they have information? That would be downright stupid.
As in contract law, the solution is to eliminate overarching or vague promises. Instead of promising to “balance the budget”, have them produce a budget plan. Instead of promising elections reform, promise election reform pilot programs. And let’s not kid ourselves, election promises made in good faith are a rarity these days. It’s time to make it harder to lie to the electorate.
Many parties do produce a vague budget going into the election, but it still doesn’t account for unexpected events like the pandemic. And even though “balance the budget for 4 years” is a somewhat reasonable promise, creating a budget 4 years in advance is a terrible idea for so many reasons. Even just through the normal course of an uneventful term, things will change that the government has no control over, and if they can’t react by modifying their budget that they made several years ago, then that will cause a lot of problems.
And if their promise is something vague like “balance the budget” and there are legal consequences to not balancing the budget, then the government would be encouraged to sell of infrastructure in order to make up any deficit they may have accrued. That’s also bad.