An Abundance Of Bull-Doodle: WHOPPER WATCH
“An abundance of caution.”
Tammy Rose, general manager, City of Ottawa infrastructure and water services
Hard to blame Rose for this whopper. No doubt it came from Happy Town News, the city’s notorious media-relations department.
Certainly there was “an abundance of caution” in taking a week to release a break in critical infrastructure. Much time to craft an award-winning press release. Lots of time to avoid cranking out the tired clanker “an abundance of caution.” Talk about fingernails on a chalkboard.
No abundance of vocabulary. No abundance of writing originality.
Locally, the above PR saw has become most famous in OC Transpo releases where caution, as the latest auditor general report on bus maintenance said, was lacking in abundance.
When things go wrong at Transpo, count on “an abundance of caution” to show in a release.
It is shameless. The one organization that screws up more than most is the transit operation which has made “an abundance of caution” a watch-word even when it isn’t appropriate.
Put “abundance of caution” in the same top-secret vault as the book How To Build Ottawa’s LRT and no one will ever find it again.
Ken Gray
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
While I can’t guarantee to vote for anyone in the next municipal election who includes in their platform the abolition of the phrase “abundance of caution”, I will seriously considering refraining from supporting in any way a candidate who doesn’t put forward such a platform plank. There are so many good, servicable words in the English language that one never has to resort to using ones such as these.
I have yet to see a sentence or paragraph that was improved by the use of this phrase while I have seen many that lost significantly by its use. It’s past time to abandon it now.