In political arguments, the meaning of words is pretty important, and so a discussion can get bogged down in defining terminology. For instance, last fall when he was running for mayor, Rob Ford said, “I will assure you that services will not be cut, guaranteed.” In that sentence, what exactly does “guaranteed” mean?
Usually, we expect a guarantee to provide assurance against a broken promise. Very often in the business world, a guarantee ensures that customers receive their money back if their purchase fails to perform as advertised. But when a politician fails to deliver on a guarantee, what is the consequence? Does he resign? Do we, as citizens, get our votes back? It’s hard to see an enforcement mechanism here, and therefore even harder to understand what the mayor meant by the word when he used it.
But that hasn’t stopped Rob Ford from repeating his guarantee that services will not be cut, even as he and the rest of City Hall are in the midst of explicitly discussing which services should be cut. In a July 22 interview on CP24, Ford denied that the city hired the consulting firm KPMG to advise on how to cut services. He said the KPMG report councillors received this month “has nothing to do with cuts. It’s finding efficiencies.”
Here, again, we find ourselves backed into a sticky semantic corner because the recently released KPMG study does not recommend efficiencies, at least not in the sense that speakers of English typically understand that word. In fact, KPMG was recently commissioned to conduct another entirely separate study just to look for efficiencies, since the last report was expressly about identifying which services were essential and which could be “reduced or eliminated.” When most of us talk about cuts, “reduced or eliminated” is what we mean. That certainly seems to be the understanding of Rob Ford’s deputy mayor, Doug Holyday, who told the Toronto Star recently, “There’s going to be some cuts, I can assure you of that.”
But Ford appears to be using a different definition. Because seconds after he said that the city was not even considering cuts, he said that perhaps the city should be getting out of the business of running parking lots, or funding the arts, or owning and maintaining public parks. In short, he seems to use the word “efficiencies” to mean what most of us mean when we say “cuts.” And like his use of “guarantee,” his use of “cuts” seems to be lacking a definition at all.
In these cases, it is fairly easy to conclude that if we agree on standard definitions, the mayor is not telling the truth. I said so in two recent posts for thegridto.com in which I fact-checked 10 claims made this month by the mayor and his brother Doug and found them lacking veracity.
Many people responded by calling the mayor a liar. But in the spirit of precision, we should keep in mind that there is more than one reason why a person might fail to tell the truth. He could be lying, certainly. But he could also misunderstand the facts. Or he could be ignorant of the facts. In most conversations, the semantic distinction between calling someone wrong and calling him dishonest is actually fairly crucial. One is a comment on his level of knowledge or his ability to reason, the other an attack on his character. It is one of those strange situations where calling someone stupid is actually the kinder of the available word choices.
I would be lying if I said I was sure—that I could guarantee—whether the mayor is lying or simply displaying astounding ignorance when he says things that are very obviously not even close to true. But this is one of those occasions where the semantics are actually not that important. For someone in a position as powerful as Rob Ford is, having no clue what you’re talking about is just as indefensible as being dishonest. And in either case, what this lack of truth means is that voters who trusted Ford have been—and are still being—misled. That is not a matter of semantics. It is a fact.
