Letter of the Day | Can politicians admit to mistakes and tell the truth?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The Prime minister of Canada stood in parliament and declared: “It was only after advice from law enforcement that we invoked the Emergencies Act.” He was referring to the act that had been passed into law in 1988, but was first invoked on Valentine’s Day this year due to prolonged disruptive actions of the self-proclaimed ‘Freedom Convoy’ parking their trucks on Ottawa streets for several weeks.

However, at parliamentary committee hearings in late May, both the former and the current chiefs of Ottawa Police Department and the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, testified under oath that they had offered no such advice. Watching the complete chaos caused by mendacious statements made in the ‘mother of all parliaments’ in London’s Westminster, and in so many other world capitals, it seems that being untruthful and never admitting mistakes have become quite normal along the corridors of power in most legislatures these days.

Watching misleading and deceptive antics of so many elected officials, reminds me of a bosun on my very first trip to sea at the tender age of 16, on a Liverpool freighter bound for West Africa. My task was to chip rust and apply red lead preservative paint on an area of steel deck as the bosun (ship’s officer in charge of equipment and the crew) had directed, but had not handed the paintbrush into the bosun’s locker for cleaning at the end of the workday. Next morning, when challenged by the bosun, I had made up a silly, untruthful excuse. The bosun was not amused by my juvenile stupidity, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, and slammed me up against the paint locker door. He told me in no uncertain terms, in a vocabulary that I was only beginning to comprehend, that when a mistake is made you have to own up to it. He told me everyone makes mistakes, and by lying about them at sea could put my own life and those of my shipmates in danger.

Over six decades later, I can still smell his breath as he held his weather-beaten face so close to my own teenaged, pimply phizog. Hearing Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard sing Pancho and Lefty with the line, “You’re breath’s as hard as kerosene”, always brings a flashback to that old Liverpudlian bosun. Of course, these days his actions would probably be deemed as workplace intimidation or violence, but I am so glad to have learned my lesson at an early age about the importance of always admitting to mistakes and telling the truth, and only wish that many politicians could say the same.

BERNIE SMITH

Parksville, BC

Canada