On complex problems

This morning, I posted about the problems with a couple of the Cons' recent excuses for concealing information about torture in Afghanistan. But while it's not that difficult to dispense with those or indeed most of the Cons' other diversions, there's a more fundamental issue with the Cons' tactics which deserves to be pointed out.

There was plenty of attention paid this fall when Stephen Harper's mentor Tom Flanagan offered up his view that what a political party says doesn't have to be true, it only has to be plausible. But from what I can tell, the Cons have taken that philosophy a step further when it comes to scandals associated with their government.

Flanagan's construction seems to suggest that parties should at least care whether or not their claims are based on some rational argument. If a particular message isn't at least plausible - not just on its face to somebody who doesn't know the issues, but upon serious review - then it's a dangerous one to be make public.

But Cons seem to have cut the ultimate plausibility of their excuses of the picture altogether. Rather than worrying about whether any particular distraction even passes the laugh test once somebody with a reasonable amount of background knowledge goes to the trouble of examining it, they seem to have decided that their only requirement is that any implausibility require some work to demonstrate, creating a disproportionate burden on anybody seeking the truth compared to the ease with which the Cons can parrot talking points.

From that starting point, it really doesn't matter at all just what it is that the Cons bring up as an excuse. Sure, the fact that the Canada Evidence Act and the Privacy Act have something to do with the realm of information management might make them relatively easy ones to point to in an effort to deny responsibility for covering up documents. But the story wouldn't play out any differently if the Cons instead said they had to deny the information under the Bank Act, and accused the opposition parties of hating capitalism. Or, for that matter, if they said they were prohibited from releasing the information by Matthew 2, and accused the opposition parties of making Baby Jesus cry.

Whatever their shiny object du jour, the Cons can count on having enough mouthpieces parroting their talking points to fight a particular point to something approaching a draw for the first day of coverage when it receives the most public attention. Then, by the time somebody who actually understands the issue looks at it in detail, making it clear to those paying close attention just how devoid of merit the Cons' claims are, the Cons already have a new excuse ready for dissemination. (And as an added bonus, they can cycle through the excuses to ensure the expertise required to debunk the last one isn't of much assistance in dealing with the newest one - further stretching the resources of the media, opposition parties and anybody else with an interest in the ultimate subject.)

So the problem goes beyond secrecy and cover-ups, beyond bucket defences and shifting goalposts. In effect, the Cons have figured out how to take advantage of the complexity of Canada's system of laws and institutions - but only as a means to avoid accountability by always having some excuse at the ready which Canadians don't know enough to recognize as false on its face.

Which means that anybody trying to cut through the obfuscation - on Afghan detainees or any other issue - is always going to be at a disadvantage so long as the Cons' claims are taken seriously enough to be seen as deserving refutation. But while the detainee issue would seem to be a perfect opportunity to change that state of affairs (given that some of the documents nominally being withheld based on the Cons' excuses are already available for public inspection), there hasn't been much sign yet of the Cons being treated with the absolute distrust they've done so much to earn.