What would a competency test for a politician look like? I was wondering that a few mornings ago. I've been through demonstrated competency evaluations. The ones relating to Self Contained Breathing Apparatus come to mind because they mattered. The assumption is that the air outside the mask has too little oxygen, or too much of something bad, like methane or chlorine. You can bet that I and the other people involved paid attention.
The most intense one happened going on site for a big gas plant turnaround. A small team of people have to don the mask and all the safety gear, hook up to a joint air supply, and go into the shack that simulates a confined space work place. They set off a smoke bomb and the joint air supply is cut off. You have to switch to your emergency reserve tank, and get organized to get everyone out within a specific time limit. If someone gets left behind, everybody fails. Yes, it's stressful.
There are professional standards boards for engineers, doctors, teachers, and lots of other professions. There are educational requirements to enter the profession, and periodic recertifications are required. The person driving the bus or LRT was trained and had to demonstrate they could drive the vehicle safely and deal with emergency situations. The same is true for the people driving other heavy equipment used to maintain civic infrastructure. Police and armed forces personnel have to be trained to safely use firearms and other potentially lethal equipment. There are any number of other examples where people have to demonstrate competency before being allowed on the job site. In addition to credentials some job sites have what is called a tailgate meeting. It's a safety and procedures review that happens just before the actual work begins.
It isn't just job related. Many teenagers take Driver's Ed, then do a written and driving exam, and only then are they allowed to operate a motor vehicle on the road with the rest of us. Looking around, it seems that many of the people on the road have forgotten those l essons. I see lots of people driving well above the tacitly assumed speed limit plus 10K, weaving in and out of traffic trying to get ahead. Or running red lights. That's getting really bad here.
As a digression, I still think that we should create car simulators, similar to simulators used to train aircraft pilots, and people should be retested on a periodic basis. Say every 5 years till 60, then more frequently. If you collide with another vehicle or object or get a speeding ticket, or demonstrate a lack of competence, you go through retraining.
Driving is a cognitively difficult task and as we get older some brains become unable to keep up with the speed of events. A simulator is an objective way of measuring if a person meets a set of standards, rather than relying on family anecdotes about grandpa getting lost, or a physician who might see a patient for a few minutes when they're having a good day and think they're fine for driving.
Teens should get a special deal, put in a more sophisticated simulator that has a camera to see where they are looking. If they aren't looking around enough as they go through a simulated parking lot (say the one under City Hall with all the tight turns), a pedestrian appears and goes splat against the windshield, along with the most anguished screams possible. Out on the road, if they aren't looking as they go through an intersection, or change lanes, they get a simulation of a car crashing into them, hard. They get huge noise, bruises from the seatbelt, all with the idea that at least some of kids should wet their pants in fear. You think I'm being hard on them, but consider, a driver is only as safe as the least safe driver of the vehicles around them.
You get one guess at the profession that affects us all, and yet has no requirement for competence. Yeah, you guessed, as if anyone couldn't. Politician. It used to be said that the only real requirement was sincerity and once you could fake that, you were in. Lying with a straight face is considered a valuable asset as well. It used to be that lies had at least some basis in reality, but lately the lies are just stupid.
D Smith of Alberta falls into the stupid lies category. She tried to court separatists and normal people, and is in the process of getting her ass chewed off. I don't have the slightest shred of sympathy. She is a failed politician that led the Wild Rose floor crossing debacle of late 2014. A smarter person would have licked their wounds and found other work with a lower profile. She went into radio, then ran for premier. I think it was a stunt to raise her profile, and was as surprised as the rest of us when voted into office after Kenny was tossed out. I'm pretty sure she felt like the dog who caught the car and wondered, 'what now?' She is trying to keep her job by pandering to separatists and putting the rest of us through a deceitful, wasteful referendum with at least some questions that are fundamentally impossible to enact. Open the Constitution to abolish the senate indeed. That is pure drug dream fantasy land.
Just now most Canadians are caught up in the whiplash between an extremely competent Prime Minister, and an utterly incompetent President. Carney brings more economic expertise than any other previous Prime Minister, indeed, more than the entire House of Commons put together. True, he has no previous experience as an elected politician, but he seems to have caught on quickly. Just now he has the highest approval rating of any politician in Canada.
Trump has no expertise beyond knowing how to pander to a stupid base, and telling lies to enrich himself. His economic ideas, such as they are, come from outmoded theories that produced the Great Depression. He is a tool Putin is using to destabilize western democracies, and there could be a discussion if he is a witting or unwitting tool. I've said it elsewhere, but Trump is presiding over the end of the American Empire. A country that votes him or someone like him into office, or lets him continue in office is no longer a country you can trust.
So back to my first question. What would a competency test for a politician look like? This isn't a new question. Plato's Republic explored this 2400 years ago. I don't propose to tell you what he said, it's easy enough to read it yourself. It is utterly applicable to what we see today.
It's easy to say, 'in an ideal world' but that's not the world we live in. Canada is a great place to live, and almost all Canadians are great people, but it seems the bad eggs suck the air out of the room and take up all the media space. When all you read is about political lying about obvious facts, it's easy to assume that all politicians lie about everything all the time.
I'd like to believe that politicians get involved because they want to contribute to their community. After all, if the idea is to get rich there are other ways to do so that are far more lucrative, with the bonus of being less obvious and less visible. The problem is that many of those jobs have competency requirements or other barriers to entry. Politician isn't a particularly attractive job, at least not for me. They end up attending a lot of meetings, listening to a lot of blather, much of which they either already agree with, or already disagree with.
There's a popular saying that anyone that actually wants to be a politician shouldn't be allowed in the job. I've heard suggestions that the job should be treated like jury duty. I've no idea how such a system could be arranged.
I'm thinking a prospective politician ought to have some relevant life experience they can point to, preferably where there has been a demonstrated competency evaluation, and some indicators of a successful outcome. Politicians have come from every walk of life, some successful, some less so. I like that we could get politicians from a variety of professions; it brings a variety of viewpoints to deal with ever more complex issues.
I'd like to see politicians old enough to have some life experience and maturity, but no so old they've turned into 'hey you kids get off my lawn!' geezers, or fall asleep in meetings. I get it's hard to summarize that in a pair of age numbers. I'm pretty sure that we should be dubious about electing someone much older than their late 60's. Biden and Trump are both fine examples of doddering old men that shouldn't have been allowed to take office as president.
Post secondary education outside of workplace certifications? I'm not so sure. Standards have gone to pot even in my lifetime. Lots of bright successful people do not have a post secondary degree. In many cases all it means is that someone had the money, or someone willing to lend them the money, to jump through hoops that often don't seem to have much relevance to real life. Many jobs use the degree as a way to eliminate some of the applicants, regardless of experience.
I don't think they should need to have previous elected political experience, because then how would they ever get elected to the first post? In Calgary it's no surprise to find a candidate for City Council to have experience on the Board of their local community association. I'm there, doing that, and totally agree it's good experience. But not every place has such community associations. And no, in case you were wondering, I have not the slightest interest in running for City Council.
There's a scene in My Fair Lady where Pickering asks Higgins if he is "of good moral character." The context is where women are concerned, but I like the idea, if only we could make it work. A politician of good moral character is likely to be doing what is right for their constituents. Being religious or going to a church is no guide; it's clear that too many church leaders are only out for themselves. Too many of the followers just use religion as a stick to beat other people.
And another digression. I can remember my parents taking me to see My Fair Lady when it came out in the theatres. I didn't think much of it then, but got the 1994 remastered DVD and was blown away by how lovely it was. Pity that Hollywood can't make movies this good anymore.
Who do we trust to validate whatever qualifications a candidate presents? Maybe we need a non-partisan organization to set voting boundaries, act as fact checkers for political speeches, and provide expense account auditing services. I'd love to see the giant hook come out from behind the curtain to drag off the politician that tells more than 3 lies during a debate. Of course, the next question becomes, 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?'
Part of the problem is ignorant voters. Nobody who understands what is involved in changing our Constitution would vote yes to those questions on the referendum. There are more than 1.1 million voters who just demonstrated that they don't know the existing requirements to vote in an Alberta election, wanting Alberta to create a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
Even worse, voters are being led to believe that elections could be rigged. Which is nonsense. All politicians should be required to actually declare they won't say an election was rigged if they lose. Doing so should be automatic ejection from the election, though of course there should be a procedure to review the outcome via recounts and judicial review. The incidence of wilful voter fraud is essentially zero. The incidence of accidentally voting when not eligible is an extremely small number out of hundreds of millions of votes, and there are checks and balances to catch both kinds of errors.
What about recalling politicians? I don't think that's an answer, especially if the reason given is that a bunch of people disagree with the political decisions made. After all, a politician was democratically elected. The election is the time to examine a candidate's qualifications and platform. A recall vote is essentially another election in which there is nobody running in opposition. If the politician commits actual crimes, that's different. They should all have their expense accounts and elections spending rigorously audited.
I don't have a photo that goes with this rant, so I think I'll just go straight into the of the day feature.
Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)
Film
Linda, captured by the cat snore-on generator.
Newfoundland
New Brunswick
Why ever didn't I publish this, and maybe I did
90 days, or so ago, at the Diamond Valley car show. It was so orange.
Flower, the last dahlia of the year. There was a photo earlier, here, scroll down to photo 9, of it covered in snow, and this is what it looked like a few days later. No surprise.
Landscape, Writing on Stone Provincial Park.
Serendipity, your tax dollars at work.
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