While living in Singapore, I made a mental note of large and small differences that set our cultures apart, for good and bad. During the infrequent times I had trouble coping, I looked forward to returning to Canada, where I was convinced certain practices just wouldn't happen. Once back home, though, I discovered that things weren't as ideal as I had thought. For instance, I was critical of Singapore's reliance on foreign workers for cheap labour, a policy that does not allow outsiders to feel any belonging to the country they are contributing to, and only makes locals feel resentful toward newcomers for undercutting their wages. I wrote a long blog post comparing the immigration policies of Canada and Singapore, highlighting how Canada recruited immigrants on much healthier terms. But alas, we have long had a "temporary foreign worker" program that I hadn’t been aware of until recent years, and it has been expanding rapidly. Now I witness a fomenting of the same resentment toward foreign workers in Canada.
Another example was Singapore's lack of democratic safeguards, which in Canada prevent ruling parties from intimidating voters or rigging the system in their own favour. And yet I came home to watch our ruling Conservative party employ disinformation campaigns to prevent opposition supporters from voting, while weakening and disparaging Elections Canada, and dismantling many of the public institutions that keep the citizenry educated and informed.
This morning I awoke to yet another reminder of how misguided I was in my criticisms of Singapore. In that city-state, the ruling party has frequently sued members of the opposition for merely expressing the banal opinions and criticisms that are standard in election campaigns in the West. A Singapore opposition leader was famously sued into bankruptcy and eventually jailed for repeated accusations of ruling-party corruption, and the country's history is rife with stories of citizens and politicians who have had their government use the courts to suppress their freedoms of speech and assembly. "That's not supposed to happen in functioning democracies," I would say to whomever tolerated my rants.
It's one of the unwritten tenets of an egalitarian system of government, and something that everyone who goes into politics learns to accept – to deal with slander in the court of public opinion. It's up to those running for public office to provide their own defence, with the electorate acting as jury and judge. Calling an innocent private citizen "corrupt" should certainly be cause for legal action, but for a politician to hide behind a lawyer and the protection of the law is bad political sportsmanship. Making rivals fearful of expressing legitimate viewpoints only stifles democracy at large.
If you think any given elected official is corrupt, you or any other citizen should have the freedom to run for office and make him or her defend that charge in the public arena.
And yet here we have our mayor, Gregor Robertson, launching legal action against his opponent, Kirk LaPointe, for calling him corrupt. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from the current crop of federal Conservatives, who seem to view democracy as a nuisance that threatens the indefinite power they believe they deserve (the number of times they have threatened to sue citizens and opponents is too rich to get into here).
The reason my heart sank at this particular headline is because these kinds of defamation suits are spreading across the political spectrum, to parties I would expect to stand up for democratic traditions. Earlier this year, the Liberal premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, launched a lawsuit against the province’s opposition leader and one of his backbenchers for suggesting she may have been “possibly” involved in a scandal of her government’s making. And now we have Vancouver’s left-leaning mayor, a former New Democratic member of the province’s legislature, suing his right-leaning rival for digging up that old chestnut – “he’s corrupt!” – which has long been an old trope in election campaigns (and one to which the public pays very little heed. I recall Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien winning two of his three majority terms with the "corrupt" label being flung at him from all corners).
It’s not that LaPointe’s accusation has merit. It doesn’t. His charge stems from a secret recording leaked from a union meeting, in which Robertson’s right-hand man on council promised that the city would not expand the contracting out of jobs at city hall. After he left the room, the union decided to make a substantial donation to Robertson’s party, Vision Vancouver. On the surface, that looks shady – trading political favours for donations. But (as pointed out by the Vancouver Courier’s Allen Garr) slowing the contracting out of services has been Vision’s policy since around 2007. And unions have been legally donating to political parties that favour their agendas for as long as unions and political parties have existed. So there’s nothing corrupt about a political party sticking to its public platform, and attracting donations from organizations and individuals who support that platform.
But if LaPointe stands by his charge, then it can be thrown right back his way. One case in point is the former vice president of the Non Partisan Association, the party LaPointe now leads. Rob Macdonald donated just a few dollars shy of $1,000,000 to his party in the 2011 election, which raises the question – was his vice-presidency of the NPA contingent upon the donation? And since Macdonald himself is and was at the time working as a property developer, was that not a conflict of interest for him to be both in a leadership position and a monetary contributor to the party that could, in turn, favour his property development applications?
It certainly stinks, but it’s legal, and there is enough “corruption” on both sides to call the playing field even. But here’s the thing: it’s Gregor Roberton’s responsibility to lay out the above arguments in public debates. Vancouver’s media can easily blow the cover of bullshit off LaPointe’s hackneyed accusation of corruption. Ultimately, however, it’s Robertson’s job to do that for himself. He had the chance at a mayoralty debate on October 26, but as Globe and Mail columnist Frances Bula noted on her blog, when Robertson was confronted about the union donation, “The mayor could have come up with a number of reasonable-sounding arguments and even a counter-attack... Instead, he flopped and floundered... He didn’t even seem to know that it’s been his own party’s longstanding policy not to add to what is already contracted out. He said there was no iron-clad commitment on that.”
Robertson had plenty of time to formulate a counterattack in time for the debate, because LaPointe made the same accusation in the press and on the NPA website five days earlier. But because he lost a debate he could have easily won, Robertson is now being bitter and petulant, using a defamation lawsuit as a “re-do,” to imply, “I was totally caught off guard by that dirty, personal smear, and now I’m doing the rightful thing.” In reality, it’s his way of trying to silence the topic by legal means (expect all those involved to say, “I cannot comment on a matter now before the courts”) simply because he is unable to silence the topic with facts and intellect.
The public should be disturbed when candidates use lawsuits to hush critics and, especially, rival candidates. Certainly, there should be exceptions. Personal defamation along the lines of drug use or spousal abuse should be responded to harshly. But when debating policy and a politician’s actions in office, there needs to be a wide berth to allow for opinion and criticism. The idea accepted in most Western countries is that speech relating to the performance of government is vital to a healthy democracy. Therefore, holding politicians to the same standards of defamation as private citizens only discourages such dialogue.
In the court of public opinion, political candidates should have the skills and fortitude to be their own defence lawyers. Resorting to the courts mid-election is a sign of weakness, not leadership. But I sense that we’re just going to see more of the “sue-me-sue-you blues” in politics, simply because it’s easy and effective. I remember a time when suing political rivals would have been appalling to the electorate, and would have been a sure vote-loser. Today, it seems to be more palatable, and as long as the public doesn’t scoff at the practice, we’ll see much more of it.
Singapore’s ruling party has held on to power for almost 50 years via judicial threats and intimidation, and I witnessed how the tentacles of that operation inflicted damaging forms of suspicion and paranoia on its citizens. I understand that the few examples I outlined does not put us on par with Singapore's abuse of the judiciary, but we could one day end up being no different if we continue to reward politicians who use the courts to fight their political opponents.
