"Common sense" is easy to sell. The truth takes work.

Langley votes this Saturday. The municipal election wraps up on October 17, and provincial voting day follows one week later, on October 24.

If you’ve listened to politicians lately, including the ones who swear they aren’t politicians, you’ve probably heard the phrase “common sense.” It sounds harmless. After all, who is against sense?

But the phrase has become one of the handiest tools in modern politics.

It takes a hard problem, hides the hard parts, and hands you an answer that fits on a lawn sign. It also quietly suggests that anyone who disagrees is a fool.

"Common sense" is easy to sell because it asks nothing of the buyer.

There is an old line, often credited to Voltaire, that common sense isn’t so common. The bigger problem today is that a lot of what gets sold as common sense isn’t very sensible at all.

Political strategists have a name for people who don’t follow every twist of a campaign: low-information voters. It is usually said with a sneer. It shouldn’t be.

The truth takes work, and most people are already working. They are raising kids, caring for parents, and stuck in traffic. They don’t have hours each week to read budget documents or zoning bylaws.

Being short on time is not the same as being short on sense.

The real failure belongs to politicians who exploit that gap. It also belongs to a shrinking, stretched-thin media that too often lets them get away with it.

Verb the noun

No Canadian politician has leaned on “common sense” harder than federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. His party branded itself the “Common Sense Conservatives.” One party statement invoked “the common sense of the common people.”

For years, his stump speech ran on four slogans: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime.

Each follows the same recipe. Take a verb. Add a noun. Say it louder than the other guy.

Poilievre didn’t invent the format. It is the house style of right-wing populism across the West.

Nobody is against fixing the budget or stopping crime. That is the trick. The slogan claims a goal everyone shares, then implies the other side must want the opposite. It names the destination and skips the route. Even “build the homes,” a goal this publication strongly shares, says nothing about where, what kind, or for whom.

It is built to sell, not to explain.

That is also what makes slogans so hard to argue with. You can pick apart a policy. It has details, costs, and trade-offs you can check. A slogan has none of that. There is nothing to fact-check in three words, so the only thing left to fight is the feeling.

Slogans can also work like a Trojan horse. Everyone wants safe streets, so “stop the crime” gets an easy nod. The policy riding inside can be much bigger.

In 2024, Poilievre told the Canadian Police Association he would protect his bail and sentencing plans from the courts using any tool the Constitution allows. His office confirmed he meant the notwithstanding clause, which lets governments override parts of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Ottawa had never used it.

You can argue for or against that idea. But it is a big change to Canadians’ rights, and it came wrapped in a slogan that never mentioned it.

Take “axe the tax.” It was aimed at the federal consumer carbon price. B.C. had its own carbon tax, so the federal version never applied here. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Ottawa’s independent budget watchdog, found most households got back more in rebates than they paid in that tax. Lower-income families came out furthest ahead.

The watchdog also found that once broader economic effects were counted, most households would come out slightly behind. But that model left out the cost of climate change itself. Reasonable people can argue about that math. You just can’t fit the argument on a sign.

Then the slogan lost its target. Prime Minister Mark Carney ended the consumer carbon price on April 1, 2025, and the rebates went with it. Poilievre kept the slogan anyway, pointing it at the industrial carbon price instead. For households that had been getting more back than they paid, the “relief” was really a small pay cut.

There is an irony in all this. “Common sense” branding casts one side as calm and logical and the other as soft and emotional. It is the same move behind the popular line “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But a slogan is almost pure feeling. It is built to get a nod, or a cheer, before anyone has looked at the facts.

Other words get the same treatment. “Freedom” and “personal responsibility” sound like values everyone shares.

Then you ask: Whose freedom? Responsibility for what, and to whom? The answers are usually where the real policy lives.

An old sales pitch

“Common sense” as a political brand is not new. In 1995, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives won power under Mike Harris on a platform called the Common Sense Revolution. It promised tax cuts, smaller government, and less red tape.

Once in power, the Harris government made deep cuts to Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment. In 1996, the province stopped testing municipal drinking water in its own labs and handed the job to private labs. It did not require those labs to alert health officials when a test came back bad.

In May 2000, E. coli got into the drinking water in Walkerton, Ontario. Seven people died and thousands got sick.

The public inquiry placed much of the blame on the local water managers. But Justice Dennis O’Connor also found the province’s budget cuts made it less likely the ministry would have caught the problem. He said the government should have made the private labs report bad results directly.

Cutting red tape sounded like common sense in 1995. The bill came due five years later. It was paid by families who never saw it coming.

The phrase has crossed the border, too. In his January 2025 inaugural address, U.S. President Donald Trump promised a “revolution of common sense.” That same common sense has since delivered a trade war to Canada’s doorstep. It is the same fight now being used to justify B.C.’s snap election.

Close to home

B.C. has its own example, and it came from the NDP, not the right.

B.C. was a carbon tax pioneer, launching its tax in 2008. Before the 2024 provincial election, Premier David Eby matched a BC Conservative promise. He said he would scrap the consumer carbon tax if Ottawa dropped the requirement. When Carney did, Eby followed. The tax dropped to zero on April 1, 2025.

It was an easy sell. Gas got up to about 17 cents a litre cheaper overnight. Who could argue with that?

Here is what the pump price left out. The province lost about $2.8 billion in revenue in the first year. It also cancelled the Climate Action Tax Credit, the quarterly cheques that helped lower- and middle-income families. Even with the savings from cancelling the credit, the net hit was about $2 billion. And it comes back every single year.

Then-finance minister Brenda Bailey later called the cut “largely an affordability measure.” In other words, it was about how things felt, not how the books balanced. When the deficit jumped that fall, she named the carbon tax cut as a main reason.

Now look at the books. The province forecasts a record $13.8 billion deficit this year. That is even after it raised the base income tax rate and expanded the PST to professional services. It also plans to shrink the public sector by 15,000 full-time jobs over three years and is winding back capital spending.

A carbon tax would not fix that deficit by itself. But billions a year is a big lever to give up in a crisis. It was also a tax that put a price on pollution and sent money back to families who needed it most. In effect, B.C. gave up that lever and now asks more from paycheques and public services instead.

That is what an easy sell costs, a year and a half later.

Pavement and parking

"Common sense" shows up in local politics, too. Around here, it usually comes in the form of pavement and parking.

“Traffic is bad, so widen the road.” “People drive here, so require more parking.” Both sound obvious. Both have been tested for decades. Both tend to fail.

Add more road space and more people drive, until traffic is right back where it started.

Economists Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner found this pattern so reliable they named it the fundamental law of road congestion.

Houston learned this the hard way. Texas spent more than US$2.8 billion widening the Katy Freeway into one of the widest highways on Earth. Within a few years, rush-hour congestion was worse than before.

Parking works the same way. UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup spent decades showing that minimum parking rules often have little real evidence behind them. They force builders to pave land that could hold homes, shops, or trees.

That cost does not disappear. It gets baked into rents, mortgages, and the price of groceries. Everyone pays it, including people who don’t own a car. As Shoup puts it, parking is “a good servant, but a bad master.”

This matters in Langley, where so many of us have little choice but to drive.

A community built only for cars makes every gas tax feel like a punishment. It makes every new apartment building feel like a traffic threat.

The harder truth, the one backed by evidence, is that people need choices. That means homes near shops and transit, bike routes that are actually safe, and sidewalks that go somewhere.

Where the context went

Slogans work best in a vacuum. Canada’s news ecosystem has been emptying out for years.

Since 2008, more than 500 local news outlets have closed across Canada, according to the Local News Research Project at Toronto Metropolitan University. Glacier Media and Black Press, the two chains that dominate B.C. community news, have each closed more than 30 outlets.

Who owns what is left matters, too. Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain, owns the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, and The Province. It is majority-owned by Chatham Asset Management, an American hedge fund.

Black Press Media was sold in 2024. It is now half-owned and managed by U.S.-based Carpenter Media Group, with Canadian investment firm Canso holding the other half. Its Canadian papers are still legally Canadian-controlled, but an American company runs the business.

That includes Langley’s own paper. Langley used to have two community papers, the Langley Advance and the Langley Times. In 2019, they were merged into the Langley Advance Times. Today, its dedicated Langley newsroom is not much bigger than The Langley Union, which is one person.

That is not a knock on the people doing the work. The Advance Times reporters are top-flight journalists. Matthew Claxton, especially, is basically a one-man news machine, and he deserves all the respect in the world.

The problem is the system around them. It keeps asking fewer reporters to cover more ground, for owners who keep getting farther away.

Then, in August 2023, Meta blocked news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada in response to the federal Online News Act. The Media Ecosystem Observatory found Canadian news outlets lost 85 per cent of their engagement on those platforms. About 30 per cent of local outlets that had been active on social media went quiet.

Here is the part that matters most. Engagement with political pages and groups on Facebook did not drop.

The politics stayed. The reporting left.

So when “common sense” shows up in your feed this month, it often arrives with no context at all. Nobody is there to ask the follow-up question.

The outlets that remain have their own bad habits. Campaign coverage too often asks who is winning instead of what would work. Slogans land in headlines because they are short and punchy, and fact checks rarely travel as far.

The carbon tax debate shows how this plays out. The Parliamentary Budget Officer’s 2022 and 2023 reports wrongly mixed in the cost of the industrial carbon price. By the time the error came to light, those figures were a staple of political debate. The office first flagged the error in a note on its website.

When the corrected report came out in October 2024, headlines about the very same report pointed in opposite directions. A reader who only saw one headline could walk away believing either story.

Some outlets do worse than leave out context. In late September, the National Post ran a column by Yoni Goldstein titled “Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis.” Lewis, the leader of the federal NDP, is Jewish. Goldstein was responding to a Yom Kippur post in which Lewis reflected that he and other Jews had failed to do their part to stop a genocide in Gaza committed in their name.

The column opens with the Bible story of Korach, who challenged Moses. God has the earth swallow Korach and his family, and fire consumes his 250 followers. Goldstein then writes that Jewish law obliges the community to stop a Jew who endangers it. His next line: “Such is the case with NDP Leader Avi Lewis.”

The column notes that Jewish tradition usually answers disagreement with private, honest conversation. Then it says that approach does not apply when someone is a danger to the community. From there, it describes the “rodef,” someone pursuing another person in order to kill them, and says Jews are duty-bound to step in. It never calls Lewis a rodef outright.

Rodef is the same concept Yigal Amir cited to justify assassinating Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

NDP MP Don Davies called the column “appalling, irresponsible and likely criminal.” The column never explicitly calls for violence, and its defenders say none was meant. The National Post and Goldstein did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

We read it the way its critics do. A column that opens with a dissenter swallowed by the earth, applies a duty to stop him to a named party leader, sets aside peaceful persuasion, and then explains the law of the pursuer does not need to spell anything out.

In our view, it was an invitation to violence against a national party leader, and no responsible editor should have let it run. When big outlets reward heat over light, they teach readers that the other side is not just wrong, but dangerous.

None of that is the reader’s fault. It is not the fault of reporters like Claxton, either.

It is what happens when news gets thin, publishers get distant, and slogans get loud.

Still neighbours on October 25

Here is what slogans never mention. When the last ballot is counted, everyone still lives here.

The person with the opposite lawn sign is still your neighbour. They coach the same soccer teams, shop at the same stores, and wait in the same emergency room. A policy that feels like common sense to you might land very differently on them.

“Common sense” works partly because it shrinks the circle. If an answer is obvious, anyone who disagrees must be foolish, or worse.

It turns a neighbour into an opponent before the conversation even starts.

Journalist Amanda Ripley spent months learning from mediators and psychologists about how people get unstuck in bitter conflicts. She points to experiments at the Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University.

People who read a nuanced article before talking with someone they disagreed with asked more questions and came up with better ideas. People who read a simple, one-sided article tended to get stuck.

Ripley sums it up neatly: “When conflict is cliché, complexity is breaking news.”

Writers Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor make a related point in their book Solidarity.

Division, they argue, doesn’t just happen. It takes deliberate effort, and powerful interests invest heavily in keeping people apart. They also note that “physical separation abets psychological separation.”

That brings us back to how we build our towns. Shared sidewalks, parks, buses, and corner stores give neighbours more chances to meet across their differences. Places built only for cars give us fewer.

Questions worth asking

Nearly a century ago, the writer G.K. Chesterton offered a simple test. If you find a fence across a road and can’t see why it’s there, don’t tear it down. Go find out why someone put it up first.

That is what the work looks like. Here are some questions to carry into both votes:

• Why does the status quo exist? Major decisions from the past were likely made for very specific reasons. Understand them before you cheer for structural changes.
• Who pays, and when? Gas got cheaper on April 1, 2025. Then came a record deficit, a tax hike, and cuts to public services.
• What happened last time? Walkerton and the Katy Freeway were both common sense, right up until they weren’t.
• What does it mean for my neighbour? Especially the one who votes differently than I do.
• Is someone trying to make me mad at someone else? If so, ask why. What does the person stirring things up stand to gain from my anger? Outrage is easy to sell, and it keeps your eyes off whoever is doing the selling.
• Who has power here, and who is being blamed? Notice which way the anger points. Is it aimed up at people with wealth and influence, or down at renters, workers, newcomers, and people without homes? Pointing people with the same problems at each other is one of the oldest tricks in politics.
• Whose life gets easier, and whose gets harder? Look at who carries the cost. The carbon tax cut saved the most for people who drive the most. The rebate it took away mattered most to lower-income families.
• What would it take to change my mind? If the honest answer is “nothing,” that is a slogan talking, not a plan.

You don’t need a policy degree to ask these questions.

You need a few spare minutes, a willingness to read past the headline, and some patience with answers that don’t fit on a sign. Go to an all-candidates meeting. Read the platforms, not just the posts. Support the local reporters still asking follow-up questions, wherever you find them (insert shameless plug here).

Common sense is easy to sell. The truth takes work.

That work should not fall on voters alone. It belongs first to the politicians asking for your vote and the newsrooms asking for your attention. But all of us can carry a little of it, together.

Ask a few more questions before October 17. Ask them again before October 24.

Then keep asking, because your neighbours will still be here on October 25.

References

• Statement from Pierre Poilievre on the federal budget, Conservative Party of Canada
• Poilievre takes private tour of Coulson Aviation as he continues Island tour, Oak Bay News
• Tory leader says he’d deny bail for some criminals, Toronto Star
• Just how far is Pierre Poilievre willing to take the notwithstanding clause?, CBC News
• After earlier carbon price error, new PBO report confirms earlier findings, Global News / The Canadian Press
• PBO releases updated carbon price report after previous error sparked controversy, The Canadian Press via CKOM
• Federal fuel charge leaves households worse off in economic terms, PBO finds, The Globe and Mail
• Roundup: The PBO’s update won’t stop the disinformation, Routine Proceedings
• Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government terminates consumer carbon price, The Canadian Press via CP24
• Pierre Poilievre vows to scrap industrial carbon tax if he becomes PM, CP24
• Walkerton report highlights, CBC News
• Tory cuts contributed to Walkerton tragedy, judge told, The Globe and Mail via Probe International
• Inaugural Address, January 20, 2025, The American Presidency Project
• B.C. Premier David Eby calls early election for Oct. 24, The Canadian Press via Castanet
• NDP launch campaign focusing on Canada-US relations, CFJC Today
• End of consumer carbon tax leaves $1.5-billion hole in B.C. budget, The Canadian Press via CFJC
• B.C. fiscal update: carbon tax cut drives record $11.6-billion deficit, The Globe and Mail
• BC Faces a Growing Deficit Despite Tobacco Lawsuit Windfall, The Tyee
• B.C. debt, deficit balloon as growth slows, The Canadian Press via Advisor.ca
• B.C. hikes tax rate as budget delivers record $13 billion deficit, The Canadian Press via Castanet
• 5 things to know about B.C.’s 2026 budget, Global News
• B.C.’s deficit forecast up $450M to $13.8B after calculation errors on gas royalties, The Canadian Press via CTV News
• The Fundamental, Global Law of Road Congestion, Strong Towns
• Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t, City Observatory
• Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking
• Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta’s News Ban in Canada, Media Ecosystem Observatory
• When journalism is turned off: Preliminary findings on the effects of Meta’s news ban in Canada, Media Ecosystem Observatory
• Demise of three Metro Vancouver community news outlets mirrors troubling pattern in Canada, experts say, Tri-Cities Dispatch
• Carpenter Media Group completes acquisition of Black Press Media, Carpenter Media Group
• Carpenter Media Group completes acquisition of Black Press Media, National Newspaper Association
• Black Press Media concludes transition of ownership, Black Press Media
• From our family to yours: Merry Christmas, Langley Advance Times
• Yoni Goldstein: Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis, National Post
• National Post crosses dangerous line by publishing call for violence against NDP leader, Ricochet
• Gaslighting is the New Pastime of the Left, Hersh Lberman
• Avi Lewis, Wikipedia
• Amanda Ripley, Complicating the Narratives, Solutions Journalism Network
• Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea