William Watson: Enlightening election facts

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Given the limitations of Gutenberg technology, this column was written while the polls were still open and the results unknown. Of course, with the outsized role of snail-mail ballots this year, you may still not know the results. Be that as it may, these short notes on the election are uncoloured by knowledge of who won it — assuming someone did.

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The one thing everyone now knows about the election is that it cost $610 million. In fact, that’s a government spending forecast, so $610 million may just be the opening bid. While voting early, however, I was happy to see that the single-use pencil they gave me was not painted. Added up over millions of pencils, that presumably saved a few dollars.

In 2019, 18.35 million Canadians voted. Six hundred and ten million divided by 18.35 million is approximately $33.19. I’m guessing that, given some people’s view of the choices they faced, if you’d offered them $33.19 not to vote, they would have taken it. I don’t think I heard one party leader say maybe we could do an election for less than $610 million. Does it really cost $33.19 per voter? You’d think there would be economies of scale in producing ballots, pencils and so on. We haven’t been buying these things from former PPE suppliers, have we?

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My other favourite election fact concerned the English-language debate. If you download the transcript, you find that in two hours 24,444 words were spoken (though you want to subtract the identifiers, i.e., “Justin Trudeau: …” or, in fact, the now most-famous debate participant, “Shachi Kurl: …”) If you delete everything the leaders said, you’re left with 6,903 words (including identifiers) spoken by journalists and the “ordinary” Canadians who asked questions live. That’s 28.2 per cent of the total words spoken, which strikes me as a lot.

I wasn’t all that impressed by what the leaders said, but it’s them I wanted to hear in action, preferably debating one another, rather than in combat with journalists showing how clever they are at spotting contradictions in what the leaders have promised or done. The CBC’s Rosemary Barton announced her arrival at the microphone by greeting the leaders with: “Let’s try and get some answers this time, shall we?” In other words, if you don’t answer my question the way I like, you’re not really answering. After an 87-word question to Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet, she allowed him just 48 words before interrupting, twice, after which he asked, in his most endearing intervention of the evening, “May I propose my own answer please?” If journalists don’t think enough of Canadians to let us form our own judgment about whether politicians are answering or not, well, it’s clear why lots of Canadians don’t think much of journalists.

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Though universally panned, the English debate did have an important subtext. If the country’s politicians and their political staff can’t organize a coherent two-hour debate, do we really want them imposing their several-hundred-point policy programs on the country? I didn’t actually count the initiatives in the Conservatives’ 153-page recovery plan for Canada. The fairness doctrine says I should have. I did count the proposals in the Liberal platform. There were 512 or 570, depending how you treated bulleted or un-bulleted commitments. (Interestingly, there were two proposals regarding actual bullets: no more use of rubber bullets by the RCMP, and no more magazines that can hold more than the legal number of bullets.)

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John Ivison wrote last week about how his son, a first-time voter, was dismayed to learn that campaign platforms are not solemn commitments. The rest of us, far from being dismayed, are relieved by that. Most of what makes it into a platform isn’t carefully thought through. It’s perfectly fair for parties to signal the kinds of things they like so as to give voters a view of their general orientation and then, on peripheral matters, decide that really wasn’t such a good idea.

On platform planks they emphasize on the stump and in their advertising, yes, they should follow through if elected. But on items 25 through 570, voters should exercise forbearance. One of the dumbest things politicians do is to promise, when there is a royal commission such as the one on Truth and Reconciliation, to enact every one of its dozens of recommendations. Anyone who has ever served on a committee understands that the compromise necessary to get to a final report or recommendation often involves clauses most sensible people hope the entity to which it’s all being sent will over-rule. Speaking now to whoever has won: It’s OK, you don’t have to implement every last bullet point. What we want from you is judgment, not gestures.

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My other favourite election factoid is that prime minister Robert Borden’s electoral record was just .500: he lost twice to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, including losing his own seat once, before then winning two majorities and serving as prime minister for nine years.

Not to compare any of today’s party leaders to Robert Borden but our recent practice of one-and-done — think Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Andrew Scheer — may need re-thinking. It would be much better if Canadians didn’t have to “get to know” someone who wants to be their prime minister. Yes, dating mores have changed in the age of swiping left and swiping right, but it wouldn’t hurt to see a person in action for a few years before he or she asks for the top job.