I’ve written before about how I think Premier Doug Ford is a BS artist, talking at length, and confidently, about subjects it seems he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t tell the truth about, and doesn’t seem to care. I know, because I hear from people about it often, that many people listening to the winding, multi-clause digressions and qualifications of Mayor John Tory think the same thing. And many also have their bovine feces detector sound off when they hear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau address the SNC-Lavalin scandal or his refusal to implement electoral reform by uttering a series of empty platitudinous non-sequitors and carefully hedged explanations.

Many people probably get the same impression reading columnists in their local paper or hearing the pundits on radio and TV.

A Canadian may ask, why are we drowning in such high levels of BS?

Maybe it’s part of our national character.

That’s a possible interpretation of a cross-national academic study published out of University College London earlier this month that found Canadians have a higher “proclivity to bulls---” than anyone else in the English-speaking world. (They spell out the terminology of their fancy ivory tower lingo — but the Star has different standards. Hat tip: I learned about the study from a tweet by Paul Fairie.)

The paper is entitled “Bulls----ers. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?” and written by researchers at University College London and Australian Catholic University. In an introduction in which they acknowledge the recent popularity of defining the term and outlining theories of it in both academic and popular presses, they say there’s an “important gap in the literature” when if comes to measuring who’s doing the BSing.

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The researchers defined a BS-er, for their purposes, as “individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill.” That guy at the party going on confidently about how the Leafs overpaid William Nylander when he hasn’t watched an NHL game since Gretzky retired.

They set out to measure this quality by testing more than 40,000 people in nine countries — 15-year-old students taking an international assessment test. As part of a pre-test questionnaire, students were asked to rate their knowledge and ability of 20 different mathematical concepts — four of which were entirely fake. Using their self-proclaimed mastery of non-existent subjects, the researchers placed the participants on a “bulls--- index,” and then cross-referenced their results with other demographic and personality results to see who was spreading the fertilizer.

“Our findings support the view that young men are, on average, bigger bulls----ers than young women, and that socio-economically advantaged teenagers are more likely to be bulls----ers than their disadvantaged peers,” the paper says, possibly surprising few.

But then when they compare the residents of various countries, eyebrows maybe get raised. At least around here. They found Canadians are more likely to pass off BS than any other English-speaking nationality. Americans followed closely behind, making it a continental trend. (At the other end of the scale, those from Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland were least likely to try to engage in BS.)

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What are we to make of this? On the one hand, I thought those confident, brash, endlessly self-centred Americans would be out-fertilizing us by a wide margin. I mean, just look at their president, who baselessly claims to “know more than anybody” or to be the “greatest” addressing such subjects as infrastructure, hostage negotiation, and drones (among other topics), but also recently described himself, the oldest person to ever assume the office he now holds, as “young and vibrant.” The man seems to define the term in question.

But then, as I said back in the beginning, you start thinking about our own elected officials, broadly. Is it close? Huh. Maybe we elect them because they are a reflection of us.

It’s possible, of course, that the study doesn’t actually provide an accurate measure of what it attempts to — that 15-year-old test-takers aren’t representative of larger populations, or that the test takers were mistaken (confusing the fake terms for real concepts they actually did know) rather than full of it. It’s possible the study itself is BS. But perhaps it’s not.

I have the Canadian inclination to spin anything associated with our country into a source of pride: we’ve made ordering coffee loaded with dairy fat and sugar and drinking milk out of bags into treasured elements of the national identity. A generation of schoolchildren were taught that the robotic arm of the space shuttle was a defining technological triumph largely because it’s something we made that the Americans didn’t.

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If confidently claiming to know things we really don’t is something we’re actually better at than those Yankees and Irish and English and the rest of them — is it possible we ought to celebrate the BS North Strong and Free?

Nah. That’s a load of, um, crap. I’m not sure you can spin bragging rights out of shameless, ignorant arrogance.

But maybe if we’re so inclined to it, we could become better at detecting it — and make our voting decisions accordingly. Just a thought.

It is fun to think about, and be aware of. As the researchers say, it’s possible BSing is a useful (if annoying) skill that some people may cultivate — and which may help them in the world and workplace even if its considered a social flaw. On that, as a professional opinionated chatterbox, I couldn’t possibly comment.