Let’s just say right off the top that it is troubling that a politician in the United Kingdom has been ordered to report to a London courthouse, where he could be charged with misconduct for telling a fib while in office.
It simply isn’t the place of the courts to regulate political speech, or any speech at all. In a free society, people largely need to be able to speak their piece – no matter how wrongheaded – without fear of prosecution.
But when the politician in question is Boris Johnson, the polarizing and somewhat clownish MP associated with the Brexit movement, couldn’t we bend the rules just this once?
Tempting, but no. The right to be wrong stands, even under the strain of the Bojo test.
That doesn’t mean Mr. Johnson didn’t earn the inconvenience of fending off a private prosecution brought by an anti-Brexit campaigner who was exasperated by blatantly false claims, made during the 2016 referendum campaign, about the financial benefit of pulling the U.K. out of the European Union.
As an MP at the time, Mr. Johnson was one of the leading Brexiters. He used his government bullhorn to repeatedly claim that leaving the EU would put an additional £350-million – a week! – into the U.K.'s pockets, new wealth to be showered on health care and other pressing matters. It was an outrageous claim and a core selling point for Brexit; it even appeared in giant type on the side of a campaign bus.
Mr. Johnson went on to repeat the debunked figure during the 2017 general election campaign. The chairman of the U.K. Statistics Authority was so appalled that he wrote a letter to Mr. Johnson decrying the "clear misuse of official statistics.”
It’s easy to understand the frustration of the person bringing the private prosecution against Mr. Johnson. A widespread abuse of the public trust, powered by outright falsehoods about the magical post-Brexit world, helped the Leave side narrowly win the 2016 referendum. That outcome has paralyzed the British Parliament, and the U.K., for three years.
A similar frustration is often felt by voters around the world. The erosion of confidence in mainstream politics is partly because of a perception, on the left and the right, that a lot of politicians are selling tall tales. The average voter despairs at it.
There are many Brits who would be more than satisfied to discover that Mr. Johnson’s fibs had landed him in the dock. (And many of Mr. Johnson’s supporters who feel the same way about politicians on the other side of the aisle.)
The same goes for the many Americans who are not supporters of Donald Trump. The U.S. President has used the megaphone of his office to make false statements about innumerable minor issues, and also to misrepresent major ones, such as the findings of the report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, as special counsel Robert Mueller made clear on Wednesday.
And yes, there are surely Canadians who wouldn’t mind seeing a politician or two face a judge for saying something dishonest or outright false.
But that is not how democracy works. There is no higher authority that can order politicians to stick to some abstract, agreed-upon thing called The Truth. On the campaign trail, they can stretch it as far as they dare. It’s up to other politicians and the media to call them out; it’s up to voters to decide whom they want to trust.
Even once in office and no longer campaigning, politicians need to be able to speak freely without fear of judicial reprisal, which is why in Canada legislators have immunity from civil pursuit for anything they say in the confines of a parliament.
That is also why, under an official policy of the U.S. Department of Justice, Mr. Trump is immune from being charged with a federal crime as long as he is President – even if, as Mr. Mueller keeps saying, there are grounds to believe he obstructed justice.
As frustrating as that may be to some, those protections lie at the heart of democracy; they are always the very first things to die when authoritarians take over and start jailing political opponents.
With few exceptions, in a free society elected officials should only leave office the way they came in – with the assistance of voters.