The Stake That’s Directed at the Heart of Democracy: Grewal Tapes

In the Edmonton Journal, philosophy professor Arthur Shafer spells out what’s at stake in the Grewal Tapes: democracy.

He writes:

It should be noted that the punishment specified for the purchase or sale of a parliamentarian’s vote is severe: “imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.” Fourteen years. That’s the same maximum penalty as the law provides for sexual assault aggravated with a firearm.

Why would the law carry such a heavy penalty for bribing an MP? The answer, I think, goes to the heart of our values as a liberal democratic society.

Murphy’s language reflects the kind of plausible deniability that conspirators everywhere use when they’re unsure if the police are taping their phone conversations.

The selling of political offices, unlike the selling of goods, services, and even offices of a company, undermines political trust which undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy:

There are special norms that are meant to govern behaviour in the public realm. When the self-seeking values of the private sphere are illegitimately imported into the public sphere, then the public sphere becomes debased.

Public officials have a fiduciary duty to excise their judgment and allocate government offices solely on the basis of what they think is best for the community.

When citizens perceive that politicians are motivated by self-serving interests rather than the public’s best interest then the very label “politician” becomes a term of abuse. What should be seen as an honourable vocation comes to be seen, instead, as mere opportunistic careerism. The resulting contempt and cynicism can easily undermine the foundation of democratic society.

Machiavelli writes that a prince must appear to be honest but in reality should practice honesty and dishonesty as circumstances require. There might be some realistic advice in there, which the Liberals have taken to heart. However, Machiavelli may have overestimated the ability of politicians to keep up the charades, and modern techniques of accountability and transparency, like the ability of an MP to tape his phone conversations and then post them on the Internet, make such charades increasingly difficult.

Machiavelli also thought the prince could get away with his lies because people are generally “ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain.â€? In today’s world, they’d rather sit dumbly in front of their televisions watching “Survivor” than showing concern for their polity.

Machiavelli’s description of “the many” may indeed fit the majority of Canadians.

But this doesn’t make the contents of the Grewal tapes any less disturbing. Their contents are as threatening to our democracy as the manner in which the Liberals have been undermining responsible government in the House. Compound this with the roll of Joe Volpe in “priming” Grewal with the RCMP, and the seeming evidence that the Liberals used the same techniques of selling an office to Belinda Stronach, we’re in big trouble.