Justin Trudeau gets full marks for creativity in answering the new benchmark of leadership: 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck.

New life was given to the decade-old question of which you’d rather fight, or which would win in a fight, when U.S. President Barack Obama dodged it in September on the community Internet forum reddit.com.

Trudeau took it on and Canadianized it in an interview with University of Prince Edward Island student Josh Coles, which was published in his student newspaper.

“Oh, definitely 100 duck-sized horses,” said the Liberal MP and leadership candidate.

“I was raised the eldest of a whole bunch of brothers and cousins, and I’m really good at fighting with crowds.

“If you’ve ever tried to pet a Canada goose you know how aggressive a single, normal-sized goose can get, and how ill-tempered they can be, I would imagine that a large duck would be fairly unpleasant.”

Trudeau “didn’t belittle it,” Coles told the Star. “He took something of his personal life experience.”

Trudeau’s reply drew 300 comments on the website, but it did put him at odds with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, who would fight a horse-sized duck.

“I’d distract it with some cracked corn and, as it gobbled it up, I’d jump on its back and take it for a flight,” Kristoff answered.

There is no right answer but whatever you say says a lot about your creative reasoning, Dr. Hugh Arnold, former dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, told the Star.

“It’s a perfect job-interview question. To me, it’s a bit more like an inkblot than a question that has a right or wrong answer.

“The nature and quality of the thinking in the response is more interesting than whether or not they got the right answer.”

Because of how it speaks to his background in organizational behaviour, Arnold preferred the original 2003 British pub philosophical question: would one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses win a fight.

“If bigger wins market domination and a company is producing things that are very difficult for others to copy, then I’d go for the horse-sized duck.

“If you’re talking about an industry in which there are no dominant players, then the duck-sized horses because you could have many potential innovators.”

Arnold invoked the story of giant Gulliver who was captured and tied down by the tiny people of Lilliput because they figured out a coordinated attack strategy.

Then again, “There’s some stuff you have to read into it: a horse-sized duck would just waddle around and fall over.”

As for the 2012 version, which of the two would you fight, Arnold figured the “big dumb duck would be easier to outsmart” unless he was reduced to a bare-fisted brawl, then “I’ll take my chances with the little guys.”

Engineers have tackled the question aerodynamically, historians have invoked warfare logistics and Bill Nye the Science Guy called it a draw.

“A horse-sized duck would probably collapse on itself and duck-sized horses would freeze to death because of their size,” said Nye.

The “which would you fight” conundrum captured a lot of airtime on British radio in 2010 after making the rounds of British ad and media blogs in 2007 and 2008.

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Its actual origin may be traced to a book on early mammals published in 1983 with an illustration of a giant duck surrounded by tiny horses.

Even Psy, the Gangnam-style pop culture icon, has gamely taken up the challenge. He’d rather fight 100 duck-sized horses.

To Arnold, the varying strategies themselves reveals a business game plan: “It shows the value of diversity.”

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