Hypocrisy, The ICC, And Our Dysfunctional House

A Plea For Consistency

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Two things happened on Thursday that seem disconnected, but actually are connected. On the one hand. Nate Erskine-Smith released a piece on the Opposition’s ongoing blockade of the House of Commons, blaming the Opposition for playing politics with a serious issue. On the other, the ICC issued arrest warrants for three people, but namely Bibi Netanyahu, and Justin Trudeau said he’d abide by them if Bibi came to Canada.

The reason they’re connected is that almost everyone in both the Liberal and Conservative Parties, and most of the media too, are being complete fucking hypocrites. Not everybody is, but a lot of people are showing their asses here by picking and choosing when institutions and the rules of the game matter, and when we get to selectively choose to apply those rules. Justin Trudeau, in defending his position, deferred to the ICC and essentially said it’s out of his hands. The problem is, he’s currently defying the express will of the House of Commons in complete defiance of all Parliamentary precedent and procedure, so he does possess the ability to not just robotically comply with orders.

On the other side of the House, Poilievre isn’t any more consistent - both demanding that Trudeau comply with the House’s will, no matter that three experts are unclear on whether it’s even within the House’s purview to order what they have, while demanding that Trudeau not blindly follow the ICC. It would be comical, if it wasn’t so depressing, that nobody is willing to make a principled case that actually holds up on both sides. So, it’s up to me then.

If Canada wants to be the country we claim to be, Netanyahu must be arrested if he ever steps foot on our soil. The Government must also immediately comply with the will of the House and hand over every document they want. Because at the end of the day, believing in institutions isn’t about believing in them when they say what you like, but about not letting your personal view of their individual decisions blind you to their basic purpose.

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Is what has happened in Gaza a genocide? I don’t know and I don’t particularly care about the verbiage. The fight about whether it’s a genocide has always felt like a distraction from the real point, which is that the Israeli government has responded to a legitimate terrorist attack and tragedy in a disproportionate way that has failed any number of basic moral standards in the conduct of warfare. Netanyahu, Gallant, and everybody else directly responsible for the conduct of the war are monsters.

Whether they have met a legal threshold for genocide is not my area of expertise, and I’m not going to do a bad imitation of experts in international law to pretend I know with certainty one way or another. I don’t, and most of the people claiming they do know are lying to you. What I do know is that the ICC has made a decision. And as an institutionalist, that is the point where my personal opinion taps out.

If a police officer refused to arrest his friend because he didn’t think he was guilty, we’d all be up in arms. The way things work require officers of institutions to do their jobs regardless of their personal beliefs. In an international context, Canada cannot be signatories of the ICC and yet be selective in which cases we are willing to comply with rulings in. The very point of international structures is to ensure that countries don’t descend into factionalism and favour trading that comes at a cost of outcomes. We haven’t reached that point, as thousands of Security Council vetoes show, but it is the point. We cannot just abandon our obligations because we think they got one wrong.

On the other side, however, the Conservatives who are decrying Trudeau’s willingness to defer to institutions are screaming bloody murder that he is applying their intellectual argument on the ICC to the documents problem in front of the House. Plainly, the House fucked this up. Their express wish would be a bad precedent that would risk the administration of justice and arguably should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. I agree with Nate on all of that stuff. But where he and I depart is that all of that can be true, but he finds that far more relevant than I do. Because to me, everything I just wrote doesn’t fucking matter, because the House’s right to make idiotic, shambolic, and borderline unconstitutional decisions must be sacrosanct.

We are a Parliamentary democracy, which means in reality we are a country that puts its faith in a group of people to do right by us. They routinely don’t, which is why the public get to change their minds, but it is a system that requires representatives to do their best. A majority of members have made their views known, and they have continued to show their views by refusing to change their minds. The House has decided this is what they want. We must steadfastly protect their right to it, even though they are acting like fucking idiots.

The thing that so many people are missing about this is that none of this is about the salient details of individual circumstances. This is about the kind of country we want to be. This is not a defence of the ICC or a condemnation of it. This is not a defence of the CPC or NDP or Bloc. This is about having a set of rules that we listen to regardless of whether we like the outcome or not. If Pierre Poilievre tried to defy a similarly stupid vote of the House of Commons, all of the Liberals and progressives currently defending Trudeau would all be talking about how best to show our #Resistance. If the country being accused of war crimes wasn’t Israel but, say, Iran, I suspect the CPC wouldn’t be showing as much resistance to the ICC. Because we’re all hypocrites.

What we need less of is people who think the rules only apply when we like them. What we need - especially on the left, which through polarization has become the pro-institutions side of the argument - is to actually defend institutions and rules regardless of whether they benefit us. Hypocrisy doesn’t help anybody except the people who want to tear the system down. What we need is intellectual honesty and people to admit that the rules are the rules whether we like it or not. And if we can’t do that, we might as well give up entirely.