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Of all the things about Justin Trudeau that grate on non-Liberals, a big one is his “speech disfluency” — the habit of interlacing sentences with large numbers of “uhs” and “ums.”

“It’s how we tell when he’s gone off script,” one Conservative MP told the National Post.

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An Ontario YouTuber isolated an 80-second segment of a press conference showing Trudeau saying “uh” 50 times. Another wag edited down a CTV interview with Trudeau until it was nothing but a solid 38 seconds of Trudeau saying nothing but filler words and false starts.

While “uhs” earn the deep scorn of effective speaking advocates, filler words or “hesitation tricks” of some kind are used almost uniformly by politicians, public figures and anybody else who is expected to think on the fly in front of a microphone. But is Trudeau’s speech disfluency really all that egregious? To find out, the National Post took a cursory glance at three off-the-cuff speeches by, and interviews with, the Prime Minister.

Joint press conference with U.S. president Barack Obama

March 10, 2016