Graham Steele: The fine art of breaking promises

"A Liberal government will strengthen Arts and Culture and will continue to support our thriving cultural industries by…extending the Film Tax Credit and the Digital Media Tax Credit for an additional 5-year period." — Nova Scotia First, Nova Scotia Liberal Party Platform 2013

"Clause 21 eliminates the film industry tax credit effective July 1, 2015." — Financial Measures (2015) Act, introduced on April 27, 2015, by the Liberal government

Politicians have been making promises for as long as there have been democratic elections.

The political calculation is simple: You have to appeal to voters, and they don't know you.  You have to encourage their hopes, assuage theirs fears, feed their anger, and distinguish yourself from your opponents.  You do that by making promises.  You're a hawker in the political bazaar.

Sometimes it gets silly.  The 1999 Progressive Conservative platform made 243 separate, written promises.  Another seventeen made on the campaign trail brought the total to 260.  There was just no way all those promises could be kept, and they weren't — but a lot of them were.

The truth is that our politicians actually keep a lot of their promises.  There was a recent letter to the editor, in which the writer thanked Health Minister Leo Glavine for keeping a promise on funding for autism supports.  It was a lovely, but rare, reminder that promises are indeed kept.

As sceptical citizens, though, we tend to overlook the promises kept, and remember only the ones that were broken.   The NDP government kept plenty of promises too, but all anyone remembers is the breaking of Darrell Dexter's promise, made during a televised leaders' debate: "We're not going to raise taxes."

Are politicians lying?

There are all kinds of reasons why politicians make promises they can't keep, and it's not necessarily because they're liars:

• When you're new, you think problems are simple and the solutions are easy. It's only after you're elected that you realize every issue has eight sides at least.
•  In opposition, you don't have much capacity to analyze how things really work, or how much they really cost.
• Even when you're experienced, you say to yourself something like "This sounds about right.  We'll figure out the details after we're elected."   Because winning is everything.

If you listen carefully, you might hear some promises being hedged.  There might be a general statement like "this is what we'll do, as finances allow".  Or the promise might be artfully phrased, so that it sounds good but has a big escape hatch.  In other words, the promise comes with a big asterisk.

In these situations, maybe the politician technically isn't breaking their promise, but it gives them the reputation of being slippery characters.

Explaining away a broken promise

Experienced politicians develop stock answers when accused of breaking a promise:

• "We didn't know the truth about the province's finances."
• "The last government left such a mess that we're not able to keep our promises."
• "Circumstances have changed since the promise was made."
• "It wasn't in the platform".

This last answer was used by Premier Dexter after the HST increase in 2010.  Needless to say, it didn't wash.

Often, politicians will do something faintly resembling their promise, and then claim to have kept their promise.  This is what Premier McNeil is doing on the film tax credit.  It's exasperating for people in the film industry, because what is being done is so very different from what was promised.  They were promised an extension, and instead got turmoil and uncertainty.  On this one — like Dexter on the HST — the premier convinces no-one but himself.

The role of the citizen

As voters, we have some responsibility here.  Politicians will stop breaking their promises when people stop voting for promise-breaking politicians.  The equation is that simple.

Right now, with up to five years between elections, promise-breaking politicians lose any fear of a sharp, immediate rebuke.

I've seen suggestions of a law that would punish politicians for breaking campaign promises.  The point would be to have an immediate consequence, such as a fine, or even losing a seat in the assembly.

Such a law might be hard to write, but it's not impossible.  The key would be to have a credible, independent person —like the Auditor General — making the comparison between what was promised and what was delivered.

If we had a promise-keeping law, the problems wouldn't get simpler.  But at least we'd approach them with a different kind of politics.