Our prime minister is a gifted voice artist.
Sometimes Mr. Trudeau speaks in a soft, semi-muted, soothing voice, each word sounded distinctly, and with something like a pause or a halt between nearly every word. It’s his empathy voice, it whispers the deepest sincerity of feeling, it’s his my-fellow-Canadians-I-want-you-to know-that-what-I’m-saying-now-is-from-the-bottom–floor-of-my-heart voice. (Maybe even further down, the basement.) It’s a great voice for apologies, so it gets lots of exercise. It’s also great for those staring-deeply-into-the-eyes-of-friendly-interviewers moments, when he wishes to lather whatever pseudo-profundity he’s about to utter with maxima unction.
There’s another voice — it could be called the Robert Fife voice, since it mainly shows up whenever Robert Fife (Kingslayer) comes up with another doozy of a story. The volume is higher than the apology voice, the words are evenly spaced and punctuated by what I’ll call a stream rhetorical hiccups (the trademark “ums” and “uhs” that brocade so many of his speeches), and the final stroke — a hard hit on the definitive part of the statement.
Classic example, easily found on YouTube and in other archives, from the early days of the SNC-Lavalin affair: “The allegations in the Globe story this morning ( … pause for emphasis … ) are false.” And that takes care of that. When the PM hits “are false,” the pressure put on those two words is the signal that people can accept that the story is all tosh, and everyone should go home and watch Big Brother.
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See Also:
(1) All Apologies: Ten mea culpas issued in the Trudeau era and one rejected apology request
(2) Trudeau tiptoes the Clinton-esque fine line between responsibility and atonement
(3) How 4 ex-Supreme Court justices got caught up in SNC-Lavalin affair
(5) We can’t take national unity for granted
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