An election based on promise-keeping? God save us from it. Promising is one of the diciest human functions. Even simple promises (“I’ll take you to the zoo tomorrow”) can be hard to keep. Sometimes, it’s just wrong (“You have a fever of 104”) to do so.

The most keepable promises are probably the vaguest — like marriage vows — and even they often falter. What’s amazing is how big a part promises continue to play in life. They may be a futile, inevitable attempt to deny the existence of time and the unpredictability of the future. Can’t live without ’em, can’t live with . . .

Promises in politics are especially dicey because they are so irrelevant. The main work of leaders consists in responding to unexpected events — 9/11, SARS, the jump in oil prices. You can’t promise what you’ll do because you don’t know what it will be about. Even seemingly clear promises (“We will stand shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. after 9/11”) become problematic as time unfolds (Should we send soldiers to Iraq?). I include the McGuinty tax promise. He, in fact, made two promises — save social programs and no new taxes. Neither was more “solemn” than the other. Then he faced a huge deficit. Keeping one promise meant breaking the other. He had to choose between them, there was no other choice.

So with politicians, it’s probably best to judge on what they do after being elected — or almost any other criterion — rather than what they promise. I knew a woman (granted, it was the 1960s) who said, “Nothing a man says counts until after you’ve slept with him.”

But the stress on promise-breaking is not surprising in this era, when politics has become less about acting than decrying whatever is done. What has always perplexed me about right-wing politicians like Stephen Harper is: What do they want power for? They are against taxes, which enable you to create programs. They dislike government. The tip-off is their terminology when they discuss government programs: rot, mismanagement, corruption, and above all, accountability. It is the language of accountants, abstraction, and numbers. Nothing productive, creative or human is suggested by it. Search everything Stephen Harper has said and see if you can find a hint that health care is about enhancing and saving lives rather than carefully monitoring costs. Of course the costs should be watched, but it’s as if only the malfeasance energizes him, not the actual effects on real people.

Such politicians often get more animated over private moral issues like abortion, than the collective activities that are the real stuff of politics. But there is no doubt that their suspicious, cost-cutting, hostile mentality (“In the absence of answers, we’re entitled to assume the worst,” said Stephen Harper, in the spirit of original sin) resonates with a fashionable cynicism among mainstream voters this election. What accounts for that?

Well, cynicism is usually the flip side of romanticism, and distrust follows in the wake of dashed hopes. Canadians continue to yearn for the kind of programs that were democratically created here in the past century — but for two decades, their political and opinion leaders have told them it can no longer be. They have watched the decline under successive governments, and they don’t want to feel like chumps or be disappointed again.

There is something comfy in whining about broken promises and saying you can’t trust any of them, it lets you off the hook of that great source of tension and letdown, hope: the belief that real, positive change can still happen. Elections get visceral, as this one has, not over particular issues like health care, but when they connect to deep elements of identity and self doubt — homelessness in the existential sense, you might say — and when the despairing and distrustful views expressed in the campaign resonate with experiences people are having in their own lives, jobs, families, etc.

Someone else I knew in the 1960s ended up in a miserable relationship, with no desire to leave. I asked what she got out of it. “It’s the honesty,” she said. “It’s such a relief.”

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.