With Bob Rae gone from Parliament Hill, perhaps we couldn’t expect much in the way of oration and reasoning in federal politics in 2014. There have been some shining moments, from Tom Mulcair’s sober questioning to Stephen Harper’s heartfelt speech in the House of Commons on Oct. 23, when he greeted his colleagues from all parties and spoke of how glad he was to see them well.
Most of the time, what we hear on CPAC is not so uplifting. The tu quoque fallacy, or appeal to hypocrisy, is a question-period staple: “When the party opposite was in power they did the same as us! When the party opposite was in opposition they were the first to criticize!” Or the false dilemma, assuming only two possibilities: “Either the minister knew and is corrupt or didn’t know and is incompetent! Either way she must resign!” A few examples this year were so bad they deserve special mention.
Ignoratio elenchi, or irrelevant thesis
Conservative MP Paul Calandra is not the only parliamentary secretary to the prime minister to employ the time-honoured technique of spouting nonsense. He has, however, perfected it. In 2013, he answered a question about Nigel Wright’s payment to Mike Duffy with “My father owned a pizza store” (both an anecdotal fallacy and irrelevant).
But it was on Sept. 23, 2014, that we saw peak Calandra, as he answered a question about the length of the Iraq mission by saying “there is a great deal of confusion with respect to the NDP position on Israel” (both an ad hominem attack and irrelevant). He did this three times, deliberately.
This was, finally, a fallacy too far. Calandra apologized in the House.
Begging the question
Calandra’s predecessor, Pierre Poilievre, is fond of insisting, just as Stockwell Day did back in September 2001, that “the root cause of terrorism is the terrorists.” This is a premise that assumes the conclusion. In answer to the question “why are there terrorists?” Poilievre’s answer is that it’s because they’re terrorists.
Despite being mocked for his circular approach to the problem last year, Poilievre hasn’t refined it. On Oct. 6, 2014, he put it this way: “We must remind ourselves that the root cause of terrorism is the terrorist himself. He, and he alone, has chosen his path. It is he and the evil within him that we fight.” But why did he choose evil? Because he chose evil.
This actually might make sense if you believe in evil as an entity that possesses people entirely at random. Otherwise it’s a fallacy.
Appeal to probability
Tom Mulcair is not prone to irrelevance, although like Poilievre, he has been known to resort to repeated assertion and thought-terminating cliché. He might one day have reason to take pride in his opposition to the mission in Iraq — but certainly not in the reasoning he gave for it. The NDP leader argued on Oct. 3: “Conservatives are telling us the mission will be expanded: Airstrikes, refuelling capabilities, aerial surveillance. Is that it? Is there more? Could there be more? From mission creep to mission leap.”
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc
Justin Trudeau also appealed to the 2003 Iraq mission, to support his contention the 2014 mission should be non-combat. The trouble with trying to find a fallacious argument in Justin Trudeau’s statements is that some of his statements contain no discernible arguments at all.
The most infamous example is the head-scratcher: “There is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green, we need to start, you know, investing in solar. There is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about: having a dictatorship where you can do whatever you wanted, that I find quite interesting.”
Taking this statement at face value, it is asserting the dictatorship is the cause of the recent improvement of the Chinese economy, when in fact China has had a “basic dictatorship” since well before the ironically named Great Leap Forward.
Kate Heartfield is the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial pages editor.
