Rhetoric Revisited: Decennial Reflections on Canada's Coalition Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reassesses Canada’s “coalition crisis” of 2008 though a rhetorical analysis of the national addresses of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Opposition leader Stéphane Dion. Focusing especially upon the classical rhetorical categories of ethos (the speaker’s self-identification and positioning relative to the audience) and logos (the use of reason in argument), it explores how Harper and Dion construct divergent “legitimacy principles” in defence of their positions, arguing that Dion’s speech failed, not merely because of the poor production values which dominated commentary at the time, but because of an inferior ethos appeal marked by a mishandling of the key rhetorical icon of nationhood. When we consider argumentative substance, however, we find that Harper’s address was marred by a misrepresentation of key principles of parliamentary government. Because the crisis represented a potentially significant moment of political socialization – thus involving “constitutive” rather than “ordinary” political rhetoric – the paper argues that it is consistent with a realistic model of rhetorical ethics to condemn this misconstrual as a violation of the trust reposed in democratic leadership.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".