Sanity Watch

Sometimes, Democracy Watch can be an invaluable source on accountability issues. Other times, however, it can also be something else entirely:

Saying that politicians should have to undergo lie-detector tests during election campaigns, a citizen's watchdog group has filed a complaint with the federal ethics commissioner over taxing income trusts.

The Conservative government clearly broke a campaign promise when it proceeded to tax the lucrative trusts Oct. 31, Duff Conacher, co-ordinator of Democracy Watch, told a news conference today...

There should be some kind of fine for politicians who lie and failing that, Conacher suggested a more basic, if somewhat unrealistic, solution: "In future, we could switch to a lie detector for all political leaders during election campaigns."

Needless to say, Conacher's proposals are based on an unrealistic appraisal of both the campaign process, and the responsibilities of a government. There's no apparent reason why the Cons couldn't have genuinely believed their promise at the time they made it, then acquired a better appreciation of the effect of income trusts in the meantime; surely a government can't be obligated to refuse to accept or act on any new information it acquires after an election is done with. Moreover, neither the Ethics Commissioner nor a lie detector test can be infallible - and the use of either to vet campaign promises would likely drain campaigns even further of content, resulting in every candidate promising only to consider every issue before acting upon it.

Which isn't to say that one can't fairly point out cases of supposed dishonesty. But the electorate, not a machine or a parliamentary official, needs to be the final arbiter of whether a government has justified an apparent switch in policy. And Conacher would do better to focus his concerns on informing Canada's citizens directly of broken promises, rather than seeking to take power out of the hands of the voters.