Let’s drop the curtain on Ottawa’s dumb political theatre

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Natural gas generally has a lighter carbon footprint than coal. Many Indigenous bands have benefited financially from the development of fossil-fuel resources. Fossil fuels create jobs for Canadians and revenue for governments.

Those statements are a) true and b) would result in hefty fines or (depending who you are) jail time under a private member’s bill from NDP MP Charlie Angus that purports to fight climate change by curtailing the ability of the fossil-fuel industry to promote itself. (One of the many problems with the bill is that it casts its net much wider than even that in outlawing factual statements.)

It’s unlikely that the bill will ever become law; the NDP hasn’t endorsed it, much less the other parties in Parliament. Even in that unlikely event, the law would quickly be found to violate the Charter’s freedom of expression provisions.

Mr. Angus is presumably aware of those facts but is still promoting his bill. Why? The answer is that it is a symptom of the ongoing dumb-ification of politics, in which a performative nod and wink to supporters is more important than the – boring! – business of legislating or governing.

Lately, it looks like the NDP is intent on being a dumb-ification trailblazer. Mr. Angus’s bill is just the most recent iteration; he’s following the lead of Leader Jagmeet Singh, who has baselessly rattled on about a conspiracy by grocery chains to boost their profits, thereby igniting inflation.

The (boring) truth is that the industry’s margins barely budged during the pandemic. There is a solid, nuanced critique at hand: the big chains’ gross margins didn’t much decline as inflation took off, meaning they passed the pain of rising prices onto consumers. Concentration throughout the supply chain is also an issue. But that critique is difficult to fit into an X post or a TikTok video.

Similarly, the NDP was busy flaying Conservative MP Scott Reid for his “deep ties to Corporate Grocery.” There’s just one problem: those ties are to Giant Tiger, a godsend for cash-strapped Canadian families.

Now, the NDP has lots of company in dumb-ification. The Conservatives have set the nod-and-wink standard in many respects: casting vague aspersions on the World Economic Forum; misrepresenting the impact of carbon pricing (no, it is not a major driver of inflation); and pretending that the Canada-Ukraine free-trade deal forces Ukraine to adopt a carbon tax.

The Liberals, too, are deep into the dumb. A case in point was its own effort last fall to pin the blame for inflation on big grocery chains. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kicked off that effort with a warning that he was willing to enact punitive taxes if grocery retailers did not get with the government’s program (whatever that was). And then there was the follow-on farce of Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s attempt to arm-wrestle grocery chains into limiting future price increases.

It was obvious then, and more so now, that it was all a pantomime, an attempt to give an angry public the impression of action.

Yet most of the media coverage indulged the idea that the Liberals were up to something substantive. That’s part of the problem; too often, the media don’t call out obvious instances of dumb-ificiation (although that failing is slightly less egregious when it comes to Conservative missteps).

There’s a failure on the part of partisans, too, who are all too willing to indulge obvious nonsense from their teams.

In a notable exception, the energy critics for the Alberta and Saskatchewan NDP criticized Mr. Angus’s bill. That’s partly an act of political self-preservation in those two energy-producing provinces, but it still takes a bit of backbone. Unfortunately, it’s a rare display of vertebrae. There are too many thoughtful politicians that simply avert their gaze when their colleagues indulge the irrational.

The media and political class bear responsibility for the dumb-ification of public discourse, but so do voters. Such antics would be short-lived if politicians didn’t think they bolstered support in their base. Those voters need to ask themselves why they enjoy being played for fools.

Ultimately, though, the descent of politics into dumbness comes down to (a lack of) political leadership, and to a cynical calculation that Canadians won’t demand better. Voters deserve more than the parties’ condescending cynicism, and their dreary choice of dumb, dumber and dumberer.