Dangers of complacency

Editorial

Two apparently unrelated stories in the news this week actually have a remarkable connection to each another. On the front page of Monday's National Post came the report that an opinion poll declares that 69 per cent of Canadians view their federal government as "corrupt." Slight fewer - but still a majority - viewed their provincial and municipal governments as corrupt.

In a seemingly unrelated incident, French voters on Sunday placed their president, Jacques Chirac, in a run-off election May 5 with Jean-Marie Le Pen, a neo-fascist, Holocaust-denying white supremacist. Le Pen outpolled the sitting prime minister, Lionel Jospin. Every political observer agrees that Le Pen will be massively trounced by Chirac in the run-off, but not before his extremist, anti-immigration, scapegoating policies are given their widest dissemination yet. Moreover, though Le Pen will almost certainly not be elected president of France, parliamentary elections follow in June, and Le Pen's presidential race will give his Front National an enormous momentum boost that could see the extreme right wield more influence in French politics than ever before. How are these two stories related?

The complacent attitude among Canadians that our governments are inherently corrupt is precisely the sort of view that leads to the success of hate-filled charlatans like Le Pen. French voters, bored with both Chirac and Jospin, determined there was no major point of departure between the two erstwhile leading candidates; a vote for one was not fundamentally different than a vote for the other. If there is no major difference between Chirac and Jospin, then Le Pen is just a different flavor of the same product. As we often hear Canadians say of our politicians, "They're all the same." But they're not.

A few Canadians, including some reading this newspaper, know what it is like to live under a truly corrupt regime; to fear a knock on the door at night, to be imprisoned without cause or trial, to live in genuine fear for their lives or indeed to have had their families destroyed by the power of a corrupt government. There are governments in this world today that practise "ethnic cleansing," torture and murder. Sixty-nine per cent of Canadians, according to the poll, are prepared to throw around the word "corrupt" in so cavalier a fashion that they can no longer differentiate between genuine political evil and a system that may need some tinkering.

Canadians have become so mollified by 50 years of relative safety and affluence that we can't even imagine what it means to live under a "corrupt" regime. We do not have to wonder for years what happened to a missing relative, to know that our loved one was thrown screaming from an airplane, to have had our hands amputated for holding unpopular political beliefs.

A little cynicism is not a vice in politics. In a democracy, we must keep our representatives honest by questioning their actions and their motives. But we must also resist tarring all public figures with the same brush. Say what you will about Jean Chrétien, he is not Idi Amin. Glen Clark is not Slobodan Milosovic. If we insist that all politicians are the same, then we are going to get a rude awakening when we discover they are not. If we, in our charmed complacency, consider all our governments corrupt, we will lose our perspective when someone like Le Pen comes along. That is what happened in France.

Canadian politics has been in flux for a decade, with new parties and faces emerging more rapidly than at any time since the Depression. Though we disagree with some of them, most of the figures in Canadian politics at every level are well-intentioned, honest people. Yet, 69 per cent of us think they and the institutions they serve are corrupt. This widespread attitude, combined with the continued flux in Canadian politics, provides an opportunity for a Canadian version of Le Pen, or a parallel demagogue on the left, to hijack our political system. And, since we currently believe our politicians are all the same corrupt bunch, we may just sit idly by when an anti-democratic extremist storms onto the scene, self-satisfied in our comforting certainty that "they're all the same."

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