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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".