Genevieve Simms

Director Alfred Hitchcock is famous for (a) making brief cameos in his own movies and (b) once saying that actors should be treated like cattle. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is famous for (a) making brief cameos on the political stage and (b) thinking that cabinet ministers should be treated like cattle. Apart from that, I’m sure the two men have little in common.

Yet as I lay there on the couch, ice bag clutched to my post-vasectomy groin, I realized there was something else: each man’s approach to cliché. The filmmaker spent a lifetime avoiding cinematic conventions and clichés as much as he could, preferring instead to confound and challenge audiences’ expectations. In the process, ironically, he established some of the major clichés that would dominate popular film for more than half a century. The prime minister, on the other hand, began his premiership promising a new, fresh approach towards politics, but has long since sought refuge in the stalest of political clichés rather than confront the complexity of the challenges he faces.

This parallel occurred to me as I enjoyed a post-op marathon session of old Hitchcock movies. They were mostly his early films, from the ’30s and ’40s. I was struck by the number of themes, motifs and devices that Hitchcock established, which would become clichés of the modern film industry.

Take the case of Hitchcock’s 1935 version of The 39 Steps, John Buchan’s novel of espionage and global crisis written on the eve of the First World War. The film’s narrative is propelled by a case of mistaken identity, the delivery of key information by a dying character, a prolonged cross-country fugitive chase, a race against time to save the world and an “odd-couple” relationship between the male and female leads. In Hitchcock’s hands, these devices have a freshness that helps bowl this short movie (just 80 minutes) along at a fair pace. Since then, of course, they’ve become commonplace clichés used in any number of blockbuster movies. (Indeed, Hitchcock himself would later recycle much of The 39 Steps in his classic North By Northwest, so I guess not even he could resist temptation.)

So, what’s all this got to do with Harper? Elected with a minority government in January 2006, Harper promised Canadians that his Conservatives would offer a new style of government, with great transparency and accountability and less dogmatic partisanship. Even after two years in office, Harper’s ministers still referred to themselves as Canada’s “new government,” to distinguish them from their predecessors.

By then, however, it was becoming clear that little had changed under the new boss. Less accountability and less transparency seemed to be the order of the day. Harper preferred to sidestep Parliament and rule direct from the Prime Minister’s Office, in a manner that not even Jean Chrétien or Brian Mulroney had.

As events of recent weeks have shown, Harper has abandoned even the pretence of fresh ideas and instead has embraced tried and tested clichés as a way of justifying government inaction. First, at the G8 summit in Japan, Harper said it was a “mathematical certainty” that “developing countries” such as China and India would have to bear the brunt of emissions reduction if the new 2050 target were to be met. Second, last week Harper once again declined to intervene on behalf of Omar Khadr, the Canadian prisoner currently being held at Guantánamo Bay, on the grounds that American justice should be allowed to “take its course.”

On both matters, Harper is peddling in clichés. The phrase “developing world” is a tired cliché that poorly signifies the degree to which China and India (among others) in fact possess well-developed economies and do not require lectures from such self-appointed bodies as the G8. Certainly, the problems posed by their industrial economies are massive and complex, but are unlikely to be solved by resorting to classifications that have long outlived their use.

As for letting “justice take its course,” this cliché confuses a natural phenomenon (a river’s flow) for an artificial and largely predetermined process that has only one possible result: a guilty verdict. That Khadr has been held illegally and unconstitutionally for more than six years should at least give Harper cause to reconsider his choice of cliché.

In a political culture that has absorbed all manner of clichés into its very fabric, we give politicians a free pass when it comes to uttering stale and meaningless responses on real and vital issues. “All writing is a campaign against cliché,” wrote Martin Amis in The War Against Cliché. “Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.” The war on cliché must begin at home.

David Bright has published widely on Canadian social, labour and criminal justice history. He teaches history and politics at Niagara College, Ontario.