In June, 1983, Brian Mulroney - then a candidate for leadership of the federal Conservative party - was asked about free trade with the U.S. His answer was a mixture of incredulity and scorn.
"There's a real beauty for you," he told an audience in Thunder Bay. "There's a real honey. Free trade with the United States is like sleeping with an elephant. It's terrific until the elephant twitches, and if the elephant rolls over, you are a dead man."
Within 18 months, the Tory leader - by this time prime minister - had opened talks with Washington on a Canada-U.S. free trade agreement.
All of which is to say that when considering Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's tax flip-flop this week, it's useful to keep some perspective.
By breaking his no-tax-hikes-without-a-referendum vow, McGuinty is not the first elected politician to renege on a solemn election promise.
In fact, the most interesting aspect of the broken promise syndrome is how little it seems to matter.
Politicians regularly go back on their word. And yet in the vast majority of cases, the voters not only forgive the miscreants, but re-elect them.
Take Jean Chretien's Liberals. In 1993, they ran on a platform opposed to Mulroney's trade deals.
In particular, Chretien promised not to sign the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. and Mexico unless Canada won ironclad concessions on energy exports.
The Liberals were elected. Chretien asked the U.S. to renegotiate the energy elements of NAFTA. The U.S. said no and Chretien signed the deal anyway.
"A complete sellout," sputtered then Conservative leader Jean Charest, whose party had been almost wiped out, in part because it supported NAFTA.
Yet the voters didn't seem to care. Nor did they care that Chretien had broken the spirit, if not the letter, of another election promise - to replace the almost universally despised GST with a more palatable tax.
Instead they rewarded him, with solid majorities in 1997 and 2000.
Broken - or, let us say, stretched - promises are not unique to any political party or place. They are endemic to democratic politics. Politicians make conflicting promises to get elected. Only when they gain power are they forced to sort out the contradictions.
In 1916, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election on a solemn promise to keep his country out of a devastating European war that was profoundly unpopular in America. A year later, U.S. troops were fighting in France.
"The right is more precious than peace," Wilson told Americans - and they loved him for it.
In 1990, Bob Rae's New Democrats were elected in Ontario on a platform that promised public auto insurance. Yet a year after his surprise victory, Rae announced he was scrapping plans for a public system.
Mulroney, in 1984, campaigned on a promise to uphold universal federal social programs such as the baby bonus, calling them "a sacred trust not to be tampered with." Once elected, he killed the baby bonus.
In opposition, Chretien's Liberals promised to change the patent act to make prescription drugs more affordable. In government, they did nothing.
In 1997, the Chretien Liberals campaigned on the promise of a national pharmacare program. They won and immediately dropped the idea.
In 1989, MPs from all federal parties unanimously agreed to eliminate child poverty by 2000.
There are still hundreds of thousands of Canadian children living in poverty but, aside from a few activists, no one talks about the issue anymore.
Even Mike Harris, the former Conservative Ontario premier, was not always exactly as advertised.
Among Ontarians, Harris won widespread respect as a politician who kept his word. And in many cases he did - cutting income tax rates, cutting welfare, eliminating public service jobs, reducing the number of elected MPPs.
Yet as University of Toronto political scientist Graham White has pointed out, Harris also instituted changes that he had never promised and that, in some cases contradicted the intent, if not the content, of his election pledges.
Thus the Harris Tories both micromanaged and squeezed the education system. They put in a system of municipal mergers (the Toronto megacity being the largest) that were usually deeply unpopular with the citizens affected. And with no prior warning, they split up and began to privatize Ontario Hydro.
For many Canadians, the lesson from all of this is that politicians always lie. And some politicians, like some newspaper reporters or some judges or some bricklayers, do sometimes lie.
But for most politicians, the reality is usually a little more complex.
In some cases, political parties find the world of governing far more complicated than they had imagined. That was certainly the case for Rae's NDP, which had never expected to form a government, much less implement a public auto insurance scheme it had never fully thought out.
Similarly, Harris' draconian education reforms did not stem from sheer malevolence but were an attempt to find new savings on the part of a government that had made too many conflicting promises. (Cut taxes; eliminate the deficit; keep essential social spending.)
In other cases, parties find that their election promises - while popular with voters at large - run afoul of powerful interests.
Canadians as a whole might have cheered if Chretien had followed through on his 1993 election threat to pull out of NAFTA. But the Liberals' big business backers, most of whom are committed to freer trade, would have been furious.
As for McGuinty's Liberals, it's hard to be too sympathetic. The party's entire election platform was riddled with contradictions as the Liberals promised to spend more on social programs and eliminate the deficit - all without raising taxes.
In fact, the platform itself contained a glaring contradiction. Even as McGuinty vowed to hold the line on taxes, he was promising to raise certain levies that the Tories had already cut.
The Conservatives tried to make much of this during last year's election campaign, but few paid much heed. Even the media, now apparently shocked (the Toronto Sun calls the Liberals "bald faced liars" on yesterday's front page) didn't focus on the Liberals' fatal fiscal flaw.
Will the McGuinty Liberals pay a price? That's hard to say. Rae's NDP was bounced after one term, but it's not clear the failed auto insurance promise was key to that defeat.
Mulroney was pilloried for his flip-flop on social programs and then returned for a second term with an even bigger majority. Chretien, in spite of his party's penchant for slippery promises, was never defeated as prime minister.
But the example that McGuinty might find most cheering is that of Woodrow Wilson. In spite of his no-war whopper, the former U.S. president is now considered a secular saint.OpinionThe Toronto Star:
