The best way to restore trust in politics is to make it a criminal offence for politicians to lie, says Welsh parliamentarian Adam Price.
Price has brought forward legislation in the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, that would make it a criminal offence for a politician to knowingly deceive the public. Those found guilty would be temporarily disqualified from sitting in the Senedd, or running from office.
While some countries already have laws against lying to parliament, this legislation, if passed, would be the first to bar politicians from lying more generally.
Price, a member and former leader of the centre-left Plaid Cymru party, tabled the proposal as an amendment to an election reform bill currently before parliament.
It has since been separated from that bill and sent to the standards conduct committee for review for consideration. All four parties in the Senedd have come out in favour of the proposal, and Price says he expects it will be voted on within the next couple of months.
I have to ask you. You have to be honest. In all of your years of politics, have you ever lied? Fibbed? Even a white lie, just a little bit?
I hope not. I’d be a real hypocrite if I had.
This has been part of a long campaign for me. It started with the Iraq War when I was an MP at Westminster. But, you know, here we are almost 20 years later, and I think the issue of truth in politics has never been bigger in democracy worldwide.
We’ve got falling trust in politics and in politicians. And the question is, what are we going to do about it? Well, here’s something that we could do about it. We could make it a criminal offence for politicians to lie.
So if there was one lie that sparked this for you, it dates back to the war?
For me, absolutely. And that shows that, you know, this can have the gravest of consequences. Politicians make decisions every day which affect our lives, but they can be life and death decisions, peace and war.
Setting a standard, a norm, that it is never acceptable for a politician to deliberately lie should be important to all of us. And that’s something that, unfortunately, we haven’t done.
Maybe we’ve learned to accept the kind of mendacity, the kind of post-truth politics, the wave of disinformation now that is really kind of eroding the foundations of democracy. And we’ve got to draw a line.
What you said there, though, that’s part of what would make it hard to enforce, I imagine. How do you prove that someone was deliberately lying? They could say they just believed something at the time.
We’ve got to get the balance right, haven’t we? Because what we don’t want to do is to undermine freedom of expression. That’s obviously protected.
What we’re talking about here is deliberate deception. And, yes, that does set the bar high. You’d have to prove an intent to mislead.
But that’s what we do in fraud cases. That’s what we do in defamation cases. So there are plenty of legal examples where we do the same.
And in other professions. If a doctor lies, then they are struck off. If a lawyer lies, then they are disbarred. And yet we seem to have tolerated a democratic culture where politicians can lie with impunity. Well, that’s got to stop.
At the heart of it, it’s a very simple principle. It is never, ever, acceptable for a politician deliberately to lie.– Adam Price, member of the Welsh parliament
Under the amendment you’re proposing, just specifically, how would it work? What would happen to a Welsh [member of Senedd] if they were to be found to have lied?
Like any criminal offence, any person could make a complaint. It would have to be investigated, first of all, or considered by the police as to whether there was sufficient evidence for them to conduct an investigation. And then, if there were, then it would go through the process. They would provide a file to the public prosecutor.
We rule out private prosecutions … in order to prevent this from being kind of weaponized, if you like, by tit-for-tat prosecutions between different political parties or, indeed, by vested interests. So it would only happen if there was sufficient evidence and if it was in the public interest.
We’ve got some carve-outs there to, for example, provide an opportunity when somebody does say something that’s false, they realize their mistake, there’s a period of 14 days [where] they can actually retract and apologize.
And there are exceptions for national security. There are certain circumstances, a fairly narrow set of circumstances, where it might be legitimate to protect collective security for a politician to use misinformation.
So there are reasonable protections there. But at the heart of it, it’s a very simple principle. It is never, ever, acceptable for a politician deliberately to lie.
We’ve got a small number of parliaments around the world, around about half a dozen, where it is already a criminal offence to lie to parliament. So earlier this year, the former chancellor of Austria, for example, Sebastian Kurz, was found guilty of that criminal offence of lying to parliament. The leader of the opposition in the Singaporean parliament is currently accused of a criminal offence of lying to parliament. What we don’t have yet in the world is a … comprehensive ban on deliberate deception by politicians.
Austria’s former chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, was convicted of lying to parliament earlier this year. (Lisi Niesner/Reuters)
And would it, could it, result in jail time, or are you thinking fines would be enough?
The punishment that we’ve set out currently is actually neither fines nor imprisonment. It’s simply disqualification from office. So if you were a sitting politician, you’d be removed from office. If you were a candidate, then you couldn’t stand for an electoral cycle. Our term in our parliament is four years. For a politician, that’s a very severe sanction, you know, in terms of their reputation, etc. So that’s what we’re aiming at at the moment. But obviously, you could look at other criminal sanctions as well.
You mentioned a moment ago the … resignation, at this point, of so many people around the world to the possibility, maybe even likelihood, that politicians are going to lie and are lying regularly.
If we look at the example of Donald Trump, during his [U.S.] presidential term, the Washington Post documented that he made 30,573 false or misleading claims. But as you well know, many, many Americans, his party as well, seem to continue to support him. So that’s a complicating factor when the public is not only accepting it, but voting in politicians who have demonstrably said things that are not true.
I think that example is the reason why we need to legislate, to make deliberate deception a criminal offence.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a very important couple of essays on lying in politics, said that what happens when you accept political lying is not that the public believes the lies, it’s that they stop believing in the very idea of truth itself.
And I think that’s what’s happened in sort of Trumpian America, is that all of politics, then, have suffered in terms of public credibility. People start to believe that all politicians are all the same; they’re all liars. And therefore, it has little effect on Trump’s approval rating because he’s kind of priced in this credibility gap, which has grown in politics.
That’s why we need to set this standard, in order to prevent that happening in democracies in the future and worldwide.
FREDERICTON – A look at Blaine Higgs, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick.
Born: March 1, 1954.
Early years: The son of a customs officer, he grew up in Forest City, N.B., near the Canada-U.S. border.
Education: Graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1977.
Family: Married his high-school sweetheart, Marcia, and settled in Saint John, N.B., where they had four daughters: Lindsey, Laura, Sarah and Rachel.
Before politics: Hired by Irving Oil a week after he graduated from university and was eventually promoted to director of distribution. Worked for 33 years at the company.
Politics: Elected to the legislature in 2010 and later served as finance minister under former Progressive Conservative Premier David Alward. Elected Tory leader in 2016 and has been premier since 2018.
Quote: “I’ve always felt parents should play the main role in raising children. No one is denying gender diversity is real. But we need to figure out how to manage it.” — Blaine Higgs in a year-end interview in 2023, explaining changes to school policies about gender identity.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
GATINEAU, Que. – Treasury Board President Anita Anand will take on the additional role of transport minister this afternoon, after Pablo Rodriguez resigned from cabinet to run for the Quebec Liberal leadership.
A government source who was not authorized to speak publicly says Anand will be sworn in at a small ceremony at Rideau Hall.
Public Services and Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos will become the government’s new Quebec lieutenant, but he is not expected to be at the ceremony because that is not an official role in cabinet.
Rodriguez announced this morning that he’s leaving cabinet and the federal Liberal caucus and will sit as an Independent member of Parliament until January.
That’s when the Quebec Liberal leadership race is set to officially begin.
Rodriguez says sitting as an Independent will allow him to focus on his own vision, but he plans to vote with the Liberals on a non-confidence motion next week.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs has called an election for Oct. 21, signalling the beginning of a 33-day campaign expected to focus on pocketbook issues and the government’s provocative approach to gender identity policies.
The 70-year-old Progressive Conservative leader, who is seeking a third term in office, has attracted national attention by requiring teachers to get parental consent before they can use the preferred names and pronouns of young students.
More recently, however, the former Irving Oil executive has tried to win over inflation-weary voters by promising to lower the provincial harmonized sales tax by two percentage points to 13 per cent if re-elected.
At dissolution, the Conservatives held 25 seats in the 49-seat legislature. The Liberals held 16 seats, the Greens had three and there was one Independent and four vacancies.
J.P. Lewis, a political science professor at the University of New Brunswick, said the top three issues facing New Brunswickers are affordability, health care and education.
“Across many jurisdictions, affordability is the top concern — cost of living, housing prices, things like that,” he said.
Richard Saillant, an economist and former vice-president of Université de Moncton, said the Tories’ pledge to lower the HST represents a costly promise.
“I don’t think there’s that much room for that,” he said. “I’m not entirely clear that they can do so without producing a greater deficit.” Saillant also pointed to mounting pressures to invest more in health care, education and housing, all of which are facing increasing demands from a growing population.
Higgs’s main rivals are Liberal Leader Susan Holt and Green Party Leader David Coon. Both are focusing on economic and social issues.
Holt has promised to impose a rent cap and roll out a subsidized school food program. The Liberals also want to open at least 30 community health clinics over the next four years.
Coon has said a Green government would create an “electricity support program,” which would give families earning less than $70,000 annually about $25 per month to offset “unprecedented” rate increases.
Higgs first came to power in 2018, when the Tories formed the province’s first minority government in 100 years. In 2020, he called a snap election — the first province to go to the polls after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and won a majority.
Since then, several well-known cabinet ministers and caucus members have stepped down after clashing with Higgs, some of them citing what they described as an authoritarian leadership style and a focus on policies that represent a hard shift to the right side of the political spectrum.
Lewis said the Progressive Conservatives are in the “midst of reinvention.”
“It appears he’s shaping the party now, really in the mould of his world views,” Lewis said. “Even though (Progressive Conservatives) have been down in the polls, I still think that they’re very competitive.”
Meanwhile, the legislature remained divided along linguistic lines. The Tories dominate in English-speaking ridings in central and southern parts of the province, while the Liberals held most French-speaking ridings in the north.
The drama within the party began in October 2022 when the province’s outspoken education minister, Dominic Cardy, resigned from cabinet, saying he could no longer tolerate the premier’s leadership style. In his resignation letter, Cardy cited controversial plans to reform French-language education. The government eventually stepped back those plans.
A series of resignations followed last year when the Higgs government announced changes to Policy 713, which now requires students under 16 who are exploring their gender identity to get their parents’ consent before teachers can use their preferred first names or pronouns — a reversal of the previous practice.
When several Tory lawmakers voted with the opposition to call for an external review of the change, Higgs dropped dissenters from his cabinet. And a bid by some party members to trigger a leadership review went nowhere.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
