Societal untruths

On this April first I’m thinking about some of the different ways society encourages or enables us to deceive each other.

There’s April Fools’ Day, of course, and there’s Santa Claus. Government entities like NORAD and Canada Post even get in on that “benevolent” lie.

And then there is Parliamentary privilege, which includes immunity for speech made during official proceedings:

The privilege of freedom of speech in parliamentary proceedings is generally regarded as the most important of the privileges enjoyed by members of Parliament. This right is protected by the Constitution Act, 1867, and the Parliament of Canada Act.

Freedom of speech permits members to speak freely in the conduct of a proceeding of Parliament, such as in the Chamber during a sitting or in committees during meetings, while enjoying complete immunity from prosecution or civil liability for any comment they make. In order to encourage truthful and complete disclosure without fear of reprisal or other adverse actions as a result of their testimony, this right is also extended to individuals who appear before the House or its committees. The House of Commons could not work effectively unless its members, and witnesses appearing before House committees, were able to speak and criticize without being held to account by any outside body.

Here this is presented ideally, as a way to encourage truth. It is my observation that what in fact results is a lack of accountability. Parliamentarians taunt and dare each other to repeat inflammatory statements outside the Chamber, while being procedurally discouraged from calling something a lie. The Speaker of the House has also declined, despite being the inside body, to hold MPs accountable for the accuracy of their statements: “I can determine neither their veracity nor their consistency with prior statements.” This is how this revered institution handles truth.

And then journalists are corporately and culturally expected to maintain “balance” in their reporting, an appearance of neutrality between truth and codswallop.¹

I once again wonder what principles we’re serving, and I worry about the scope of less obvious societal untruths.²

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1. I would like my partner to know that I originally wrote “bullshit” here but then, with him in mind, edited it to “codswallop,” since that doubles as a joke about unparliamentary language. ↩︎
2. In preparing this post, I also enjoyed reading “The House of Commons is a sham,” a 2011 piece by Aaron Wherry in Macleans about how effectively this revered institution is working. ↩︎