Our political leaders need to smarten up

If you asked elected officials for a list of reasons why they ran for public office, publicly begging a famous musician probably isn’t high on the list. And yet, there was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doing just that the other day, tweeting at Taylor Swift about her 2024 Eras tour and its lack of Canadian dates. “Don’t make it another cruel summer,” he (or, more accurately, his social media team) said.

This got Canada’s conservatives into a predictable lather, with the Toronto Sun mocking his efforts on its front page. They conveniently ignored the fact it was actually a Conservative Party of Canada MP, Alberta’s Matt Jeneroux, who did it first with his own pitifully desperate interventions on the matter. “I would like to file an official grievance within Parliament on behalf of all Swifties in Canada for her and her team to reconsider,” he said in a letter to Swift.

On its own, this is the sort of lighthearted stuff that tends to crop up at the end of a legislative session and it certainly doesn’t do any harm. In fairness, Liberal MP Ya’ara Saks even backed Jeneroux’s attempt to get Swift’s attention. But it still strikes me as an accurate barometer of the level of seriousness in Canadian politics right now, one that doesn’t inspire a lot of hope for dealing with problems more complex than Taylor Swift’s tour dates.

Witness the relentless campaign of oversimplification being waged on Twitter by CPC Leader Pierre Poilievre, who happily blames the prime minister for everything from traffic jams to housing prices. One of his more recent digital hobby horses is the idea of a “90-year mortgage”, something that definitely doesn’t exist in Canada but nonetheless hasn’t stopped Poilievre from pretending they do. And, of course, there’s always the carbon tax, which he’s more than happy to misrepresent and blame for everything from rising fuel prices (hello, OPEC cartel!) to food price inflation.

Jagmeet Singh hasn’t been much better on this front, given his proclivity for conflating federal and provincial jurisdiction and his habit of blaming everything wrong with this country on corporations. Even Trudeau has stooped to this level himself, whether it’s by leaning hard on his celebrity status (sometimes too hard) or oversimplifying complicated issues like COVID-19 or climate change.

Theirs is not, in other words, the same sort of serious-minded approach that people like Pierre Trudeau, René Lévesque, Joe Clark, and Ed Broadbent brought to their practice of federal politics. It’s not even on the level of Jack Layton, Stephen Harper, and Paul Martin. Contemporary politics are quickly degrading into a race to the intellectual bottom. As the Globe and Mail’s editorial board wrote last year, “Around the world in too many democratic countries, this one included, politics has lately been dominated by too many unserious politicians — of both the populist and traditional variety.”

Canadians, regardless of their partisan orientations or political beliefs, deserve better than this. We deserve to know what our leaders actually think about the key issues of the day, as well as how much they really understand. We deserve elected officials who treat serious issues seriously, and who have the training, education and aptitude required to make crucial decisions that affect millions of people and billions of dollars. And, maybe more than anything, we deserve politicians who don’t deliberately deceive and dissemble.

As such, I have a proposal: a new test for prospective politicians that gets publicly proctored by a neutral and non-partisan third-party group. We put all sorts of people through their paces when they want to become a professional, whether it’s being called to the bar or getting a Red Seal certification in a trade. Given the stakes, running for public office shouldn’t be any different.

This test wouldn’t be designed to frustrate or fail people. It should include some questions about basic high school-level social studies topics, like what each level of government does and how the courts and our elections are structured. There should be an economic literacy component to assess a candidate’s understanding of basic matters of commerce and finance and how they interact with government policy. And given the growing importance of climate change, a few basic questions about science would be useful.

Their answers, which would be posted publicly, would help voters learn two important things. First, they’d find out whether the people they might want to vote for are actually qualified for the job, although voters would be free to vote for the unqualified if they so chose. And second, they’d find out what our prospective politicians actually know and understand, and be able to see if and they were playing dumb. Again, voters could (and should) determine the value of that information themselves, but at least they would have access to it.

Poilievre, of course, would almost certainly opt out of such an exercise and declare it the work of his so-called “gatekeepers.” Let him. If nothing else, it would serve as another reminder of his steadfast commitment to populist politics, and the way it substitutes sloganeering for substance. It would also expose the lie in his party’s long-standing attacks on the prime minister’s intellectual acumen. After all, if he can pass a test they won’t even bother to write, what does that say about them?

I get it — being smart and informed isn’t popular right now. Maybe it never really was. But if we continue to reward politicians who trade in half-truths and oversimplifications and who treat the public like consumers rather than citizens, we’re just going to keep getting more of the same. And that, more than anything else, is what could actually “break” our country.