These past several days have been a difficult time for my family and me. I know many of my constituents are having difficulty with the choice I have made. To those of you who are upset with my decision – I apologize. However, I did not come by this decision lightly and I stand firm behind the decision to become a part of this new government.
Well, no, he hasn’t. There’s a difference between saying the words “I apologize” and actually apologizing, which blogger Idealistic Pragmatist identified brilliantly in a post last year, citing John Searle‘s 1969 work Speech Acts:
Searle laid out the criteria a statement has to fulfill in order to qualify as an apology, and in layman’s terms, we can say that it requires two parts: 1) regret (the “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” part), and 2) responsibility (some explicit statement that you were the one who did the thing that’s being apologized for).
[….] Often, people will use a rhetorical trick in which they make a statement that has a lot of the superficial trappings of an apology, but without one or both of those basic criteria of form. I call these statements “fauxpologies.” One classic type of fauxpology is to say something like: “I’m sorry that you’re upset about me borrowing your jacket without asking.” This fulfills the regret criterion, but not the responsibility criterion, since the speaker is expressing regret not for an action, but for someone else’s emotion.
Mr. Emerson’s apologyâ„¢ is pretty clearly expressing regret that people are upset with him. Not regret that he led people, however inadvertently, to believe that because he was running as a Liberal he would remain one at least up to the first day of the new Parliament. Not regret that, having attacked Stephen Harper’s Conservatives as unfit to govern, he promptly joined them. Not regret for anything that actually upset people. Just regret that they’re upset.
That isn’t an apology. It’s the most token of obligatory gestures. And voters would be completely justified in responding with a gesture of their own.
Great fun to mark an X in the ‘Yes’ box in the De-elect Emerson referendum this afternoon at the corner of Main and 26th.
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Aw, you Kingsway voters get all the fun.
Rob, can’t you think of an excuse to go after Owen?
Whee! Good catch.
Could David Emerson be sued for false and/or misleading election campaign advertising?
If not there should be laws regarding false and/or misleading advertising.
George, do you call what he’s doing now honesty? If you genuinely believe you did nothing wrong… don’t apologize. Instead, express your sadness that some people are angry, but you did what you did to best serve your constituents… I’m sure you can fill in the rest.
An apology has to acknowledge that you have done something wrong. Otherwise, it’s a dishonest attempt to appear to be taking responsibility while, in fact, abdicating it.
What do you want him to do? He can’t see that he did anything wrong, and none of the people calling him names and throwing dirt have shown that he did anything wrong. (Even a million people telling him he took a bribe or whatever aren’t going to convince him that he did, if he knows he didn’t).
So all he has to apologize for is that he’s upset some people. Which is what he did apologize for.
Would you rather that he’d lied?
First of all, thank you for putting up my post; not all the anti-Emerson blogs are as interested in an open debate.
I do think that Emerson’s been completely honest about and candid what he did all the way through. But I do see the point you’re making. Someone can say: (1) “I’m sorry I did X, because it was wrong to do X, and I’ll do Y to make up for it.”; and someone else can say: (2) “I’m sorry you were upset by my doing X, and I didn’t mean to upset you; but I think I was right to do X.”
You’re saying that only (1) is really an apology, while all Emerson did was (2); therefore he didn’t really apologize at all. And I’ve got no real quarrel with that. My problem was with your implying, that because (2) isn’t an apology, it’s a fake – a ‘fauxpology’ (great word, BTW).
Taking Emerson’s statements at face value, he can’t honestly do (1), because he doesn’t think he was wrong. As he’s described it: he served in cabinet for Paul Martin – not Martin’s party – and when Martin quit, he saw nothing wrong with doing the same thing for the “new boss.” And that’s all there was to it; nothing wrong, nothing he has to make up for. He’s never been a “partisan” – party loyalty is not something he values.
At the same time, he realizes that he’s upset a lot of people who do value party loyalty, which he didn’t mean to do and wishes he hadn’t done; and he wants to tell his constituents that. Hence his sending out (2) instead of (1).
My point was that (2) was all that he could honestly send out. He cannot honestly say that he did something wrong by joining the Harper cabinet, when he doesn’t believe that he did anything wrong by joining that cabinet.
If (2) isn’t really an apology, it has to be called something else – no problem there. Rather than saying “I apologize,” Emerson should have used another phrase. (What phrase, though? Virtually everyone does refer to (2)-type statements as ‘apologies’.)
What one can’t call (2), though, is ‘dishonest’, or ‘false’, or even ‘token’, when it clearly wasn’t any of those things, either.
The only way one can say Emerson has been honest “all the way through” is by forgiving him the dates of the past two election campaigns — when he joined lustfully in attacking the Conservatives as ruinous, reactionary and unsuitable to govern. I can’t find a single Emerson statement on the public record before the polls closed in January indicating that he felt loyalty only to Paul Martin, and no attachment to the Liberal Party; quite the contrary.
George, I can’t see how anyone can argue — except through a truly tortuous process of post hoc rationalization and revisionism — that Emerson presented himself to the electorate as some kind of free agent, willing to fly the flag of any party that would give him the opportunity to take part in governing. Instead, he did everything he could to associate himself with the Liberal Party and a platform (if not a record) that was profoundly at odds with the Conservatives’, and then promptly renounced both.
It’s a matter of public record that Emerson was not a Liberal, or a member of any political party, until the day that Paul Martin recruited him to be in his cabinet. Everyone in the Liberal Party knew that, and everyone accepted it – the riding association acclaimed him, for example (unlike some of Martin’s other non-Liberal recruits who had to be appointed). And they cheerfully used Emerson to raise money not just for V-K but for their entire B.C. operation.
For his part, Emerson did his job, which meant doing everything Martin asked him to do – including following the Liberal Party line as a candidate. Which is what you’re now accusing him of dishonesty for. Even though you you know very well that Emerson did not invent this Harper-bashing; that came straight from Party central, and the Emerson campaign merely parrotted it. It’s evidence only that Emerson was, as he said, loyal to Paul Martin “until the day he left” (or words to that effect; I can’t look it up now).
He did what he was told to, and said what he was told to, without complaint.
Anyway, the point is that Martin did leave; the Liberal Party Emerson left was not the Liberal Party he ran for. He changed his mind about the party because the party had changed. He’s entitled to do that.
Similarly, he’s entitled to do that about Harper.
Changing one’s mind, when circumstances change, is not dishonesty.
The only thing Emerson’s guilty of, such as it is, is complete lack of party loyalty.
George, you present a fascinating case. (I’m kind of reminded of the BBC series “Absolute Power”, where Stephen Fry plays a spin doctor character who says of a client, “What he did was indefensible. But in his defence…”)
That said, it doesn’t matter whether Emerson “invented” Harper-bashing; he participated willingly and enthusiastically. He told voters who were opposed to Harper’s platform that he was, too — vigorously and loudly. That opposition was the key to his victory, and to the public anger over his near-immediate reversal.
Incidentally, the Liberal defeat wasn’t exactly a bolt from the blue. The Grits had been running barely or substantially behind the Conservatives for most of the last phase of the campaign. Even when the fact and extent of their defeat was clear, on election night, Emerson was still telling voters he would be Harper’s “worst nightmare” in opposition.
In any event, I suspect we aren’t going to do much to convince each other. I respect your willingness to defend such an unpopular cause, and I appreciate that we’ve been able to have a civil conversation on an issue that has aroused a lot of passion elsewhere. I’m not a last-word hog, so feel free to keep posting, but at this point I’m probably going to bow out of the conversation.
Thanks, George!