Here we are on the campaign trail after months of speculating by the media and false bravado by politicians. This is, of course, because the prime minister did what he promised not to do upon taking office. And that provides a nice segue to the topic of this column — why politicians lie.

Among the first things Prime Minister Stephen Harper did after taking office in 2006 was institute fixed four-year terms of federal office that were not supposed to be broken unless Parliament lost confidence in the government. This new law, Harper said at the time with a straight face, was to prevent prime ministers from calling elections at their convenience, as Jean Chrétien did in 1997 and 2000.

Harper, of course, declared that the government had lost confidence in Parliament on Sept. 7, a bit of circumlocution worthy of Mackenzie King. Yes, yes there was enough wiggle room to allow him to dissolve Parliament without violating the letter of his own law. But he certainly did break the spirit of it.

Given that there was hardly any objection from the public about heading to the polls early, Harper appears to have gotten away with it, just as Pierre Trudeau was able to ridicule Robert Stanfield for proposing wage and price controls and then stampede the voters with “Zap, you’re frozen’’ in the 1974 campaign. (Trudeau used his majority to do what Stanfield promised to do 15 months later without much of an outcry.)

In fairness, neither Harper nor Trudeau is alone. Chrétien declared he would disband the GST in the 1993 campaign and then, once elected, even denied making such a promise.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty got elected in 2003 by promising not to increase taxes and then introduced a special health “premium.’’

Historically, Sir John A. Macdonald didn’t want Canadians to be alarmed about an overly centralized U.S.-style national government. So he pushed to call the new country a confederation instead of a federal state.

The list goes on.

Before one gets too worked up about our politicians telling fibs, we can probably take comfort from the fact that our election campaign is tame compared with that of the Americans, where John McCain appears since July to have made 11 political claims that were barely true, and 11 that were absolutely false, for a score on the Slate online magazine’s deception index of 22.

Barack Obama’s comparative credibility index stands at 12 — eight bare truths and four outright fibs.

In the Canadian election, the Liberals are trying to cast the Conservatives as the party that squandered a $13-billion fiscal surplus down to near-deficit territory without any acknowledgement that economic growth is far slower.

The Conservatives are trying to paint the Liberals as the tax-and-spend party, even though the Grits’ record for cutting taxes while in office was far better. In fact, the Conservatives actually raised the lowest tax bracket upon taking office, to pay for the first GST cut.

So truth is the leading casualty in this election, as it has been in any election.

For better or worse, lying, deception and broken promises are part of the business of politics, here and elsewhere.

Sometimes lies are told because the public simply doesn’t want to hear the truth, as Stanfield found out in 1974 or as Joe Clark found out in 1980 after warning people he would impose 18¢ in excise taxes on a litre of gasoline.

Just as deception is an acceptable tactic in war or negotiations, those in the political class often think nothing of it. As Churchill noted: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’’

On the other hand, politicians and public officials sometimes lie to the public because they honestly believe it is for the public’s own good.

This is why the free world was led to believe FDR was in robust health for most of the Second World War and why the Bank of Canada felt the need to pronounce the financial system sound in the mid-1980s in an unsuccessful attempt to stave off a series of insolvencies of trust companies, regional banks and insurance companies.

In the aftermath of AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, there will be plenty of reassuring the public. Some of those statements will be true. Others won’t.

@page_break@If Trudeau was still living, he would probably defend his campaign statements in 1974 as being in the public interest, and he might have had a point. Had the prime minister not been quick to rule out wage and price controls in the midst of stagflation, there probably would have been further disruption in labour markets, about the last thing Canada needed at the time.

That all said, a little truth now and then doesn’t hurt either.

Paul Martin probably would not have attained the public consent necessary to get rid of the deficit had he not prepared the public for the draconian cuts of the 1995 budget, or declared upon taking office as finance minister in 1993 that he would eliminate it “come hell or high water.’’ IE