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Let's not sugar coat this: lies are quickly becoming common currency in Canadian political discourse, and very much from Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives since he became the party leader.  It's an incredibly distressing phenomenon, and it feels like a few people are only now starting to wake up to it, after it's already firmly taken root.

At first, it started out pretty small, and it felt like Scheer was trying to take us for idiots since all of his claims were fairly easily disproven.  But not enough people called out that Scheer and his MPs were peddling in lies or gross exaggerations at their most generous and the government would only respond with a spoonful of pabulum rather than correct the record.  It took Bill Morneau months to correct the fact that the Conservatives had so grossly distorted the personal corporation tax rule changes so as to be unrecognizable with what was going on, and by the time he did, it was too late.  The narrative had taken hold which is what the Conservatives are counting on.

Some of those lies have the barest hint of truth that they can point to, which makes some people squeamish when calling them out.  That "73 percent hike in small business taxes"?  Was on a very narrow group of high earners.  The "devastating" job losses recorded in April?  It was 1100 net jobs lost nationally, which didn't move the unemployment rate (which happens to be at a 40-year low).  The "$1100 in carbon taxes" that Nova Scotia seniors would be subjected to?  Might apply if they made $600,000 a year.  They can insist that they're not actually lying but lying with statistics or misapplying the context of figures is still lying.

The media, meanwhile, has been somewhat complicit in uncritically passing along these lies, partly because there is a hesitancy to defend the government it's supposed to be our jobs to hold government to account, after all, and some journalists are particularly allergic to holding the opposition to the same standards.  Others are keen to add some fuel to the fire, because there's a bit of a thrill if you can help take down a Cabinet minister in a bit of scandal, and hey, you're doing your bit to keep them accountable.  Assessing truth, however, should not be limited to side-eyeing government talking points, and as we've seen, not keeping all sides honest has given rise to a particular brazenness in Scheer and company, who have decided that because they got away with lying about the small stuff, they can start lying about the big stuff with impunity.  After all, no one called them out before, and they're still hesitant to call them out now.

In the past week, we finally have seen a few examples of journalists starting to call Scheer out on his particular brand of equine manure, but it's probably too little too late by this point especially if they're going to be diplomatic about it.

"Rounding corners on facts pretty substantially," was how Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove described it on The West Block on Sunday.

"Over Scheer's first year as leader, the Conservatives have become more and more comfortable with misrepresenting major government policies," wrote Chantal Hébert in the Toronto Star on Monday.  "They are not just taking short cuts with reality.  They are leading their target audience astray.  They apparently could not care less about being called out on the distortions."

And this is where it's getting worrying.  They package their outrage clips of lies and distortions over social media, showing their various MPs repeating them in the House of Commons ad nauseum, and their base believes it, especially when the government won't call it out as false, preferring to respond with a pabulum talking point instead.  It just "proves" that the government isn't denying it, so it must be true.

When speaking about the wildly distorted story about the play structure the Prime Minister bought and paid for at the official residence at Harrington Lake, the fact that he didn't refute the alleged $7500 price tag when Scheer brought it up during Question Period last Wednesday was being touted as "proof" that it was true, and that it fed the narrative that he's so careless with the public purse on the small things that he must be careless about the big stuff.  And it doesn't matter that it's not true it's about feeding supposed "proof" to a base that wants to believe that it's true, so they'll believe any falsehood that fits their preconceived worldview.

It's tempting for people who are finally taking notice of this trend to equate it to the success of Trump-ism in the States, but this predates it to the populist campaign of the Ford brothers in Toronto politics at the very least, but it's really part of a larger trend of a lack of media literacy (which is in and of itself coupled with our lack of civic literacy).  Partisan attacks on the press are nothing new, but for the press to be gun-shy in calling out falsehoods as they happen because they don't want to be seen as partisan, it makes it worse when they do have to call out lies for what they are.  Media has allowed the small lies to fester, and when they metastasize into big lies, it's harder to take them on.

I can think of fewer things more terrifying than politics for which truth doesn't matter, where politicians can spout bald-faced lies and people will believe them because it "feels true," or it has an "emotional honesty" that is impervious to facts.  And let's be honest this isn't just the domain of the Conservatives in Canada, considering that the Liberals' whole election pitch about the problems facing the middle class included a lot of bogus points about supposedly stagnating wages that weren't borne out in the data.  But we're moving beyond that now, and the success of populist leaders in Canada and abroad is taking us in a frightening direction.  It's incumbent upon us to start calling it out for what it is, before it gets too big to manage, and before it's too late.

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