Towards a Common Language of Discourse

Lately, in my travels around the news and other blogs I have noticed that there is a vast gap in the meanings that various factions are ascribing to words.

Whether one's leaning is to the political "left" or "right", there is a significant difference in the meaning that writers are assuming is ascribed to various words.

Lately, a number of Conservative commentators (I use the capitalized word to reference to the partisan affiliation with the Conservative Party, as opposed to a philosophical conservative), have been talking about the idea of the current Martin-led Liberal government as "illegitimate".

When challenged on the question of what they meant by legitimacy, the response was a series of largely emotionally driven epithets surrounding the Sponsorship Scandal. In essence, the writer(s) were asserting that the government was illegitimate because in their view the Liberals could not claim any "moral" ground. The actions of Chretien's inner circle in the late-'90s taints the current government.

That's fine, but to me, the notion of illegitimacy has a very specific meaning in terms of Canadian Law. The assertion that the government is no longer legitimate would mean that there is clear reason to ask the Governer General to dissolve parliament immediately. Such grounds would be - traditionally a lost vote of confidence - but could also include substantial evidence of electoral fraud having taken place in the last election.

Given that the current Liberal minority government was elected last June, and to my knowledge, there were no significant voting irregularities reported, it's a bit difficult to claim that the Liberals are in a position where Her Majesty could justifiably dissolve parliament. In as much as the Conservative Leader, Stephen Harper, has not approached the Governer General with such allegations, I would have to suspect that the Conservative Party knows full well that they can only assert that the Government is MORALLY illegitimate.

Given that legislation generally fails miserably in its attempts to describe the fuzzy boundaries of the language of morality, (Even ethics is disturbingly difficult to describe in language, much less in the strict language of law) there is no legal impediment to the Martin Liberals continuing as the government. There were two confidence votes last Thursday in which the Conservatives could have toppled the government. That they did not, and have not petitioned for dissolution of parliament on other grounds lays question to the notion of the allegation of illegitimacy in any legal sense.

However, that is not the point of my writing. The underlying issue in the political dialogue in this country is one of language. The old "left-right" spectrum of politics (which served as a useful metric during the height of the Cold War era) is no longer particularly meaningful. We have a Liberal party that is occupying the philosophical space of the old Progressive Conservative party, a Conservative Party that is dominated not by "conservatives" in the classical sense, but rather by a group that seems to mix libertarianism with puritanism and a form of social Darwinism.

In short, not only has the lay of the political land changed, the language needed for reasonable dialogue has not yet been evolved. Where a Conservative commentator uses the term illegitimate to refer to the Liberal Party's moral position and to me the same term has a rather specific meaning derived from the law and Parliamentary tradition, we have a commonality of terms with a significant disjoin in their assumed meanings.

In fact, this is one of the reasons that Stephen Harper continues to have a serious credibility problem outside of Alberta. He continues to express himself in terms that play well in his home province, but are received very differently in Ontario or Quebec. That he chooses not to explain his intentions and the meaning he puts behind his words make it very hard for voters to blindly trust him. (I don't think that the voters blindly trust Martin, either, but Martin isn't labouring with the baggage associated with the old Reform/Alliance days either - where the current Conservative party managed to get itself branded as being populated by a bunch of redneck rubes from Western Canada) As with any form of persuasion, you must speak the language of those that you would persuade.