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We can hardly study at once all the ways in which everything is related to everything else Philosopher Nelson Goodman

Trudeau is the reductio ad absurdum of the illusion that the whole concept of practical difficulties is either a failure of imagination or a plot to thwart social justice. Hence his response to the failure of any high-minded sweeping promise to which no real practical thought was given, is to make an even more sweeping one with even less thought, including his recent third pledge of total transformation of Aboriginal policy in Canada. But this “gender-based policy analysis” is far more astoundingly cosmic.

Pleasing to the ear, perhaps. But ask yourself how, in practice, anyone could begin to tackle this job. As philosopher Nelson Goodman declared luminously, “We can hardly study at once all the ways in which everything is related to everything else.” Yet it’s precisely what the Liberals just blithely promised to do.

I actually pity the bureaucrats who must endure endless meetings trying to figure out how the specific policy they are responsible for will interact with all other policies now, tomorrow and for decades to come on the incredibly complex subject of gender, summarize it in a paragraph, then cross-index innovation superclusters with fishery quotas and everything else everyone else in government and outside is doing.

Photo by Andrew Vaughan/CP

In the end they, like their political masters, will retreat into a cloud of sweet-smelling mist, reporting that it was achieved because they’re such nice people. But nice as they may be (and arrogance is not technically a virtue), they will know they have failed without beginning to understand why.