Tagged: bucket defence
Harper’s bucket defence of illegal robocalls
The Harper government has mounted a classic bucket defence* against charges it illegally steered opposition voters to faraway, fake polling stations in a deliberate attempt to discourage them from voting. Their defenders say: 1. Nothing serious happened. 2. It happened to us too. 3. There’s no proof we did it. 4. In fact, it was the Liberals who did it. 5. The calls didn’t work anyway. 6. Voters don’t care about it. 7. It’ll blow over in a day or two.
Some of this commentary is just the predictable party-line pandering from pro-Harper media, but a Globe and Mail story purporting to show that the robocalls failed to reduce voter turnout rests on a surprising abuse of logic and statistical analysis.
Globe reporter Éric Grenier compared ridings with robocall allegations with ridings that had none. He found slightly higher voter turnout in robocall ridings. He also found that turnout in those ridings had increased more over the 2008 federal election than it had in non-robocall ridings
From this Grenier concluded that the robocalls “failed miserably” (the words of the headline) and that “Turnout was not much affected” (his own words). His data justifies neither conclusion. The turnout-suppressing impact of the robocalls may simply have been overwhelmed by one or more turnout-enhancing factors, such as what he acknowledges were tighter contests in the robocall ridings, or keener interest in what voters saw as a landmark election. The pertinent question is not whether voter turnout was higher or lower than other ridings or previous elections, but whether it would have been higher still without the robocall campaign.
That question—what would turnout have been without the robocall campaign?—is counterfactual and therefore not susceptible to proof. The flaw in Grenier’s reasoning is so basic and so obvious, it’s a wonder no editor caught it.** Given the “failed miserably” headline, however, it’s perhaps more likely his editors were egging him on.
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* The bucket defence, a Paul Wells or possibly George Will coinage, is akin to Freud’s Kettle Defence. That’s when a neighbor returns a borrowed kettle with a hole in it. Confronted, the neighbor responds, “The hole was there when you lent it to me. I never borrowed the kettle. Besides, I returned it in perfect condition.”
** Grenier backs off his claim that “turnout was not much affected” ever so slightly in this subsequent blog post.
Colvin’s torture testimony – #2
Richard Colvin’s testimony will test the mettle of Canada’s national reporters. Will they treat this as an issue that goes to the nation’s soul, or as just another he-said, she-said episode in the partisan gamesmanship of Parliament Hill?
So far, Paul Wells of Maclean’s is passing the test with flying colors. Within hours, Wells refuted one element of the “bucket defence” Conservative MPs put up against Colvin’s testimony.
Conservative MPs are arguing that these prisoners were, after all, trained to tell tall tales about horrible treatment to attract sympathy. This is a standard argument made by torture apologists. It is probably true sometimes.
Wells says the same argument was used to deflect the International Committee of the Red Cross report on torture at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba.
And then an interesting thing happened. The U.S. Department of Justice released detailed memos written by and for the Guantanamo prisoners’ American captors which closely matched the prisoners’ own accounts. (A summary of the techniques for which U.S. officials sought a legal fig leaf is here; Danner’s authoritative account of the ICRC report is here.)
Incidentally, Well’s footnoted definition of a “bucket defence” is worth noting:
A bucket defence is a scattershot defence against an allegation of wrongdoing. The individual parts of the defence may have no relation to one another and may even be mutually contradictory. So, say I borrow a bucket from you and return it with a hole in the bottom. You get angry. I respond: (a) There is no hole; (b) It was there when you loaned the bucket to me; (c) I didn’t put the hole there, Jimmy did; (d) I put the hole there by accident. So the Conservatives are arguing that the prisoners’ testimony is a lie; that Colvin is reporting hearsay; that he buried his reports so nobody could have found them; that prisons are dangerous places everywhere; that Colvin is an unreliable fellow. The goal of a bucket defence is not to suggest a single, coherent, rebuttal of a claim. It is to throw up such a fog of confusion and contradiction that the entire process is discredited or spectators are discouraged from continuing to pay attention.
This is exactly the approach taken by Conservative MP Laurie Hawn CTV Power Play panel.
