This paper analyzes a corpus of political rhetoric to identify the rationale for Ontario’s financial literacy education (FLE) policy decisions that came about in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. The complex politics of FLE were shaped and legitimized by special-interest coalitions’ mobilization of power, characterized by unsubstantiated claims about its efficacy. The rhetoric amounted to ‘truthiness’ over argumentation through the neglect of empirical evidence
