8 Comments

2 years is an eternity in politics, but at this you would rather be in Trudeau’s position than Poilievre’s position.

If I would be advising Poilievre, I would tell him to stop attacking Trudeau. Start talking about your plans, solutions, policies. I suspect that all these plans are still embryonic, and require a lot more definition to make them a viable alternative when the election comes. Right now Polilievre is completely exposed when anybody asks him how he is going to balance the budget (what are you going to cut?), for example.

If I would be advising Trudeau, I would recommend to welcome public enquires (as long as the terms of reference are fair). I would give Canadians more insight in the decision making process of the government. Canadians can agree or disagree with particular policies and decisions, but in general the public is willing to accept leadership by serious people that come to difficult decisions based on a reasonable evaluation of the available options.

Now, the Emergency Act inquiry has shown that Trudeau and most of his cabinet can do this. You may not agree with all the decisions, but they acted reasonably and in good faith. With Poilievre I am not so sure. The response during question period using a debunked conspiracy theory to attack Trudeau was telling. It does not take much to get under Poilievre’s skin. Not a good trait if your main modus operandus is attacking people.

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Interesting analysis, thanks.

The word is stridency, not stridentness.

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Duly noted, thanks!

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I loved your analysis. But I am not going to share it on Facebook. There's too much foul language. Do you need to swear to get your point across. You could use the acronym BS instead of spelling the word out. As for the F word, could you not have used asterices?

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The great thing about publishing on a platform like Substack, is that you are free choose your own words and thoughts. If you don’t feel comfortable reading or sharing writing that contains the words “bullshit” and “fuck”…well, that’s completely your prerogative. If Evan wanted to censor his writing, I’m pretty confident he would have done so already.

For what it’s worth, you may be interested to know there is a large body of research that shows swearing contributes to positive cognitive and emotional outcomes, and there are thousands of researchers globally who study “bullshit” without the need to code it any other way (starting way back in 1986, at Princeton.)

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.. ‘sigh’ ..

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I hope someone registered 343canada.com and is extorting friend of the...well, Philippe Fournier.

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A good analysis, I agree.

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