When politicians of any stripe give sob stories about the plight of their constituents, it’s best to take them with a shaker’s worth of salt. Miraculously, they always have a message that happens to be exactly the party line, whichever party it is, and whether it’s praise or scorn for the current government, these fictional constituents always know just the right thing to say. It’s absolutely uncanny. But sometimes, the messages defy any sort of credulity when you think about them for half a second. One such example was when Lisa Raitt was, in sombre tones, worrying about the family who couldn’t afford to fill up their minivan to take their kids to hockey practice thanks to the carbon levy when it was then much, much lower than it is today. It was plainly obvious that the carbon levy was adding pennies to a tank of gas, which that fictitious family was getting back in the rebates, but the point of the message was not veracity, but to play to emotions. Oh, those poor suffering families!

Another such example was Mark Strahl’s invention of “Briane” during the occupation of downtown Ottawa, claiming in the House of Commons that her bank accounts were frozen after buying a bit of merchandise in support of the occupiers—a ludicrous proposition given that there was certainly no tracking of donations, nor would the RCMP have any ability to track that in order to inform the banks to freeze accounts. It was risible on the face of it. We also know in hindsight that the only people whose accounts were frozen were those who could be traced to the vehicles parked in front of Parliament Hill, which was pretty much the intention all along—to make it uncomfortable for them to remain part of the occupation. But the Theatre of Lies has proven that lies that manipulate emotions are effective, and to this day, people claim that accounts were frozen for mere expressions of support for the occupation.

Another particular case in point is Conservative MP Michelle Ferreri, who has a habit of saying a lot of incredibly dubious things in Question Period, such as the repeated claim that seniors in her riding are reduced to eating cat food thanks to the policies of the federal government, or that the carbon levy has created a “mental health crisis” among teenagers. No, seriously. And Ferreri was a local journalist before she got into politics, so she knows how to do things like check facts and verify sources, but she doesn’t. This past week, she tweeted another incredibly ridiculous lament of life in Canada in 2024.

“I spoke with a Dad today, he told me he is heartbroken for his son who is an electrician and his girlfriend who is a nurse. They have worked hard to save $120,000 but still cannot afford a home in Canada. @JustinTrudeau call an election, Canadians cannot afford you.”

So, to be clear, nowhere in all of Canada can $120,000 get you a downpayment on a house. Bullshit. If you’re going to make up a sob story, which this is clearly attempting to be, then try to make it remotely plausible. In addition, one particularly astute commenter responded with the incredibly apt “What, exactly, would an immediate election do for them? Do they get a house for voting? Does your leader plan to implement price controls?”

This is one of the reasons why the fact that politics has been reduced to slogans is making Canadians as a whole dumber, because so much of this is raising entirely false expectations. Poilievre getting elected and “axing the tax” (which is not a tax but a levy) will do pretty much nothing for affordability. It will have a negligible impact on the price of fuel (there are bigger variations over the course of a long weekend than with the levy), it will do pretty much nothing about the price of food because its impact has also been negligible (when the real reason why most of the increases happened was because of climate change-related droughts or other severe weather like flash flooding or hurricanes, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turning commodity markets for grains and cooking oils upside down). It will do nothing for the price of homes, nor will any of Poilievre’s proposed policies, because his proposals would punish and reward municipalities for things outside of their control, and attempt to incentivize them with cash that is about one percent of their overall budget, using a mechanism that he couldn’t actually touch because it involves funding agreements with provinces and not individual municipalities. (Paul Wells did that math here). These slogans will not help the fictional constituents the MPs regale us with tales about, nor will they help anyone in real life, but they are playing on emotions.

Promising that a change in government will provide a quick fix for issues that are either global in nature (like inflation) or which have become structural after decades of bad policy choices by all levels of government is asking for trouble. It’s immediately setting the population up for disappointment, and if you say that they should have known that those kinds of promises were impossible from the start, or that they aren’t meant to be taken literally, then that kind of proves the point, doesn’t it? Even the very narrative of “Canada’s broken” falls into this same pattern. These are all lies designed to make people angry rather than to think about either the problem they are claiming to be pointing out, or about the solution that is claiming to be offered.

It’s unfortunately proven that this kind of tactic resonates in voters’ brains, and part of what makes any of this so difficult to combat, either from the government or the press, because those emotional responses can override higher brain functions. That’s also what makes it so dangerous for both sides—dangerous for a government who can’t counter this kind of messaging effectively, but also dangerous for those spreading these lies, because the moment they can’t deliver, all of that anger and resentment that they created has the very real potential to blow up in their faces, and that could have serious consequences for us all.