Conservatives, Liberals, and the Construction of the Immigrant: a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Bill C-50 Debate" Submitted By

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Conservatives, Liberals, and the Construction of the Immigrant:

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Bill C-50 Debate

Jacquelyn Clydesdale

A THESIS

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H Abstract

This thesis examines Canadian parliamentary discourse during a debate on proposed changes to immigration policy by the minority Conservative government. Bill C-50

(2008), a budget bill, contained proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee

Protection Act that sparked a contentious debate over immigration and immigrants. In addition to considering the historical and current context of immigration to Canada, I conduct an analysis of the rhetorical and linguistic devices employed by MPs from the

Conservative Party and the Liberal Party during the Bill C-50 debate. Through both critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics methods, this thesis exposes the way language-in-use reflects both parties' views on immigrants and how power is negotiated in parliament.

111 Acknowledgements

Thanks, first and foremost, to Dr. Tom Ricento, for the inspiration and guidance that made this thesis a reality. I very much appreciate all that you've done for me.

Thanks to my family, for always being there: Mum & Dad; Liam & Patty.

Thanks to my incredible academic support crew: Christine, for all the feedback and encouragement; Nicholas, for technical support; Michael and Chanchal, for the political stuff; Elizabeth, for inspirational organization; Rod, for the heads up on Canadian history;

Vladimir, for the calming influence, and more technical support; Aaron, Kara, Scott, and

Sarah, for the tea and sympathy.

Thanks to Gisela Engels, for the last-minute stats advice. Thanks for the reference help,

Dani Pahulje. Thanks to Allison McKinnon in SJ for helping put out fires.

Thanks to my family of friends: Joe & Leila; Lori; Monique & Maureen; Craig; Wendy;

Julie; Tracey & Paula, my best friend of twenty-five years, who always takes my calls.

Thanks to all of you for the advice, the understanding, and the love.

Multumesc to Virginia, for everything.

IV Dedication

This work is dedicated to my aunt, Maureen McKerrall. Table of Contents

Approval Page ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Dedication v Table of Contents vi List of Tables viii List of Figures and Illustrations ix

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Canadian parliamentary procedure and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. 2 1.2 Overview of the investigation into the Bill C-50 debate 5

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 7 2.1 Critical discourse analysis 7 2.2 Parliamentary or inter-party debate on immigration.... 9 2.3 Linguistic representation of ethnic minorities in media and political discourses.... 13 2.4 Canadian socio-political environment regarding immigration policies 16 2.5 Relevance for the Bill C-50 debate 22

CHAPTER THREE: HISTORICAL AND CURRENT CONTEXT FOR BILL C-50 25 3.1 History of immigration 27 3.2 The 1960s: Shift in immigration policy and multiculturalism.. 31 3.2.1 Immigration policy shift ...31 3.2.2 Multiculturalism 31 3.3 The Conservative government's position on immigration 32 3.3.1 Conservative Party of Canada's platform on immigration 33 3.3.2 Advertisements in support of Bill C-50 36 3.4 Official Opposition position on immigration 38 3.4.1 Election platform 38

CHAPTER FOUR: METHODOLOGY 42 4.1 Critical discourse analysis 42 4.2 Corpus linguistics 48 4.3 Methods 50

CHAPTER FIVE: ANALYSIS OF THE DEBATE OVER BILL C-50 55 5.1 Rhetorical strategies 55 5.1.1 Liberal rhetorical strategies: Construction and perpetuation 55 5.1.2 Conservative rhetorical strategies: Justification and relativisation 64 5.2 Linguistic strategies: Pronouns 70 5.2.1 Pronoun use: First person plural pronouns and possessive adjective 72 5.2.2 Pronoun use: Third person plural pronouns and possessive adjective 76

CHAPTER SIX: DISCUSSION 81

vi CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSIONS AND PROPOSALS FOR FURTHER STUDY..88

REFERENCES 93

VII List of Tables

Table 1. Rhetorical strategies employed in Austrian national identity debates (adapted from Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999, p. 37) 46

Table 2. Liberal MPs' use of levelling components 55

Table 3. Conservative appeals to external authority 66

Table 4. Liberal appeals to external authority 70

Table 5. Overall number of pronouns used by Conservatives and Liberals 71

vm List of Figures and Illustrations

Figure 1. The discourse-society-cognition triangle (adapted from van Dijk, 2001) 43

Figure 2. Conservative versus Liberal use of quoted material 65

Figure 3. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Our 73

Figure 4. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Us 74

Figure 5. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of We 75

Figure 6. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Their. 76

Figure 7. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Them 77

Figure 8. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of They 78

IX 1

Chapter One: Introduction

This thesis examines the parliamentary discourse surrounding immigration to

Canada in light of Bill C-50 (2008), introduced on February 28, 2008 in the second session of the 39th Canadian Parliament. Bill C-50 was a budget bill put forth by the governing Conservative Party of Canada. In addition to fiscal concerns, the bill included a proposed amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act which

"authorize[d] the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to give instructions with respect to the processing of certain applications and requests in order to support the attainment of the immigration goals established by the Government of Canada" (Bill C-

50, 2008, Part 6). The debate over this amendment in the House of Commons between the members of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC, or Tories) and the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC or Grits) sheds light not only on the way in which language-in-use reflects (or does not) both parties' views on immigrants, but also how power is negotiated in parliament.

The analysis of the transcripts is framed within critical discourse analysis (CDA)

(van Dijk, 1993). CDA is an academic approach that seeks to expose how discourse works to establish and maintain power imbalances (Blommaert, 2005). This approach lends itself particularly well to the type of data analyzed for this thesis because the members of parliament (MPs) have a collective social power based on their position (van

Dijk, 1993), and the language they use can highlight the "missing link between discourse and dominance" (van Dijk, 1993, p. 251). In examining the debate between the 2 representatives of the two main political parties in Canada,1 the struggle for power reveals much about the strategies the members of parliament use in defining the Canadian immigrant experience.

The core questions in this investigation are: In what ways are immigrants linguistically and rhetorically defined in Canadian parliamentary discourse? How do those definitions change depending on the political affiliation of the speaker? How do the two main political parties use 'the immigrant' to negotiate power? Examining the linguistic and rhetorical devices of parliamentary discourse, with these questions as a framework, reveals those features of national identity construction and political methods related to immigration issues.

In order to understand the context of this investigation, it is important to review some of the key concepts and procedures underlying Canadian parliamentary democracy, especially with regard to the kind of bill and debate considered in this thesis.

1.1 Canadian parliamentary procedure and the Immigration and Refugee

Protection Act

Bill C-50 (2008), The Budget Implementation Act, was put forth on February

28th, 2008 in the second session of the 39th Canadian Parliament. This was a budget bill from the minority government formed by the Conservative Party of Canada in the 2006 election. Before outlining the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Act,

1 With one exception, only the Conservatives (sometimes as the Progressive Conservatives) and the Liberals have ever formed governments in parliament (Russell, 2008). 3 it is important to note some specifics about Canadian parliamentary conventions and procedure, especially in regard to budget bills.

The Parliament of Canada consists of the House of Commons, the Senate, and the

Queen (Malcolmson & Myers, 2009), but "it is common, in everyday speech, to equate

"Parliament" with the House of Commons" (p. 116). I use the terms "Parliament" and

"the House" interchangeably throughout this thesis to mean the House of Commons.

All bills must be voted on by the House as a whole and pass with a simple majority (Marleau & Montpetit, 2000). The vote on the 2008 budget (Bill C-50, 2008) was considered a 'vote of confidence' in the governing Conservative party's ability to rule: "it is generally acknowledged... that confidence motions [include]... motions concerning the budgetary policy of the government" (Marleau & Montpetit, 2000, para.

4). In the event of a vote of non-confidence (the bill fails to get majority support in the

House), the government falls:

Simply stated, the convention [of a 'vote of confidence'] provides that if the

government is defeated in the House on a confidence question, then it is

expected to resign or seek the dissolution of Parliament in order for a general

election to be held... Naturally, it is more likely that the government will fail to

retain the confidence of the House when the government party or parties are in a

minority situation. (Marleau & Montpetit, 2000, para. 2)

The minority government of the 39th Parliament was not able to pass legislation without at least some support from members of the opposition parties.

All bills must go to a committee stage after second reading (Marleau & Montpetit,

2000) where they are reviewed and then come back to the House with recommended 4 changes. As a budget bill, Bill C-50 was referred to the Standing Committee on Finance

(Bill C-50, 2008). The proposed immigration policy changes included in the budget bill were not debated separately or sent to the Standing Committee on Immigration, which could have recommended changes (Marleau & Montpetit, 2000)2.

The proposed changes were included in Part 6, and "authorize[d] the Minister of

Citizenship and Immigration to give instructions with respect to the processing of certain applications and requests in order to support the attainment of the immigration goals established by the Government of Canada" (Bill C-50, 2008, Part 6). Many opposition members considered these amendments a drastic change to not only parliamentary procedure , but also to Canadian immigration policy and the powers of the immigration minister. The MPs raised questions pertaining to the values and judgments of the immigration minister, the legality of the term instructions, and concerns about the abuse of temporary workers and students.

The debate over Bill C-50 (2008) occurred because the minority Conservative government attempted to include this unpopular legislation within the budget bill; since the House had only been elected two years before, the opposition parties were hesitant to vote against the bill and force an election (Russell, 2008). Because "Parliament provides a forum in which opposition members can criticize the government, offer constructive alternatives, and perhaps even succeed in pressuring the government to make changes to

2 MP Olivia Chow (Trinity-Spadina, NDP) made a motion on April 17th, 2008 (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008d) to separate Bill C-50 into two separate bills. The motion never came to a vote in the House and the bill was not split (Bill C-50, 2008). 3 It should be noted that although it is unusual to include changes of a non-fiduciary nature to a budget bill, it is not unheard of: in March 2005, the then-governing Liberal Party (also in a minority government) tried to add environmental legislation to its budget (CBC News, 2005). 5 a bill or even withdraw it" (Marleau & Montpetit, 2000, p. 118), a contentious debate ensued.

1.2 Overview of the investigation into the Bill C-50 debate

The primary theoretical approach informing this study is critical discourse analysis (CDA), which allows linguists to study the (re)contextualizations of political ideas, particularly as they relate to identity construction on a national level (de Cillia,

Reisigl & Wodak, 1999). CDA can best be described as an 'approach,' rather than a strict theory (van Dijk, 1993), which encourages political awareness and conscience in academic researchers. I address this in detail in Chapter 2, along with a review of the literature pertaining to CDA studies and Canadian socio-political history.

To provide further context for this investigation, Chapter 3 three provides a very brief history of the Canadian government's immigration policies in the twentieth century.

Of particular interest are instances in Canada's past which are specifically mentioned by

MPs in the House: the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, internment camps during World

War II, and several Acts in Chamber (proposed or enacted) expressly prohibiting members of certain races from entering Canada. Next, I outline Canada's official multiculturalism policy, as well as examine official policy statements on immigration.

Each of the individual parties' official platforms on immigration issues is examined, along with the Conservative government's million-dollar, pro-Bill C-50 (2008) advertising campaign targeted at immigrant communities.

The methodology of the study is outlined in Chapter 4. This section outlines the methods established by researchers working in CDA (particularly those by van Dijk,

Wodak, and Ricento) pertinent to the investigation into the Bill C-50 (2008) debate. 6

Next, I provide details of the construction of the data set, including the parameters of the word search within the Hansard4, the number of words in the corpus, and the types of

software used to investigate the linguistic patterns of the speakers.

Chapter 5 contains the analysis of the data set of parliamentary transcripts. I uncover some of the main rhetorical tactics employed by Liberal and Conservative MPs,

focusing particularly on the strategies outlined in Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl & Leibhart

(1999). Because "pronouns are deeply embedded in naming people and groups, and are

thus always political in the sense that they always imply relations of power" (Pennycook,

1994, p. 175), I also explore the use of pronouns by members of both parties. These rhetorical and linguistic patterns work together to reveal each party's relationship to

immigrants and to power.

Chapter 6 features a discussion of the trends and tendencies uncovered in the

study, with a particular focus on the basis for the two parties' differing tactics. I present

conclusions and suggestions for further study in Chapter 7.

4 The transcripts of the Parliament of Canada are referred to as the Hansard, in keeping with British parliamentary tradition (Commonwealth Hansard Editors Association, 2006). 7

Chapter Two: Literature Review

The research I have undertaken for this thesis involves the discussion of the following issues:

• Parliamentary discourse, particularly inter-party debate

• Immigrants and immigration

• Canadian socio-political environment

Within the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework I adopted for my inquiry there is not a single study - to my knowledge - that covers all three issues. However, some of these topics have been addressed separately, in (a) CDA studies of different genres (e.g. media coverage) or locations (e.g., USA or UK), or (b) in non-CDA-specific analyses of

Canadian policy on immigration. In this chapter, I introduce these studies and pinpoint their relevance to the inquiry I propose, following a discussion of CDA.

2.1 Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was established in the late 1980s by Fairclough,

Wodak and van Dijk, among others (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000). Fairclough's (1989) work on British political discourses in the era of Margaret Thatcher is considered the first

CDA-based study, offering "the synthesis of linguistic method, objects of analysis, and political commitment that has become the trademark of CDA" (Blommaert & Bulcaen,

2000, p. 454).

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is best described as an approach rather than a strict method - a principled approach toward academic research that takes social justice as its foundation and concerns itself primarily with the discursive nature of power/control/dominance (van Dijk, 1993). There are several schools of CDA, all of 8 which take the above as their main principles, but which focus on different aspects of discourse in establishing power/control/dominance. For example, the British school relies heavily on the works of Foucault for conducting their analyses (Fairclough 1989, 1992;

Hodge & Kress, 1979); the Vienna school takes Critical Theory and historical research into account in its approach (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999); and the CDA practiced by the Dutch school (led by van Dijk), focuses on the triangulation of society, discourse, and social cognition (van Dijk 1993, 1997, 2001). This latter approach forms the basis for my investigation, for the reasons presented below.

In general, CDA analyses aim to expose power imbalances systematically, by examining language-in-use in given contexts. Van Dijk (1993) explains:

'[M]odern' and often more effective power is mostly cognitive, and enacted by

persuasion, dissimulation and manipulation, among other strategic ways to

change the mind of others in one's own interests. It is at this crucial point where

discourse and critical discourse analysis come in: managing the mind of others is

essentially a function of text and talk... dominance may be enacted and

reproduced by subtle, routine, everyday forms of text and talk that appear

'natural' and quite 'acceptable.' (van Dijk, 1993, p. 254) [italics in original]

The linguistic manifestation of dominance and power are therefore the main concern of any CDA-based analysis (Blommaert, 2005); such an investigation can uncover unquestioned and unexamined beliefs about immigrants, along with the tactics to achieve and maintain the political power necessary for governing and managing them.

Because of its explicitly political orientation, CDA provides an excellent framework for investigations of disenfranchised populations (Blommaert, 2005; van Dijk, 9

1993). Although the category of 'immigrant to Canada' may contain members who are more or less disenfranchised depending on a number of variables (e.g. social, economic, or linguistic), there can be no doubt that immigrants are a managed population

(Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998; Vukov, 2003).

2.2 Parliamentary or inter-party debate on immigration

In the British context, van Dijk (1993) gives an example of the discourse patterns underlying the way representatives of western democratic governments debate issues related to ethnic minorities. The CDA approach gives van Dijk a framework for identifying the tactics, both conscious and unconscious, used by those in power to enact and reproduce dominance. The analysis highlights the privileged access one particular

MP has as a representative member of the governing party in the House - including the genre of his speech, which only he and his fellow members have the 'right' to use.

The MP in van Dijk's (1993) example was a member of the governing

Conservative Party in the UK at the time of his speech (1985). The MP was a member of the power elite in multiple senses: he was a white male, upper-middle class, Conservative

Member of Parliament. Van Dijk points out that the MP's privilege and influence were exhibited in his speeches to the house, in articles he wrote for national newspapers, and in quotes on radio and on television. As a result, "[h] is political power as an MP is thus paired with his symbolic, discursive power consisting in controlling the minds of his

(secondary) audience, namely the media, other elites and finally the public at large" (p.

275). The MP's story is reflected in the public discourse within the UK as favourable toward the dominant in-group, and contributes to an 'us vs. them' mentality (Gumperz,

1982) in regards not only to immigration, but also to members of left- and right-wing 10 parties. The Canadian parliamentarians who talk about immigrants and opposition party members in this study also make use of in-group constructions, even if their speeches are not as explicitly xenophobic as in van Dijk's example.

Inigo-Mora (2004) focused on the in-group construction of British parliamentarians through their use of the pronoun we. This study, although not explicitly

CDA-based, examined the relationship between members of parliament's use of we/us/our/in a debate over a proposed education reform bill and the individual member's relationship to the parliament or his/her political party. Through their use of we, MPs indicate their "solidarity-inclusion within and, at the same time, their opposition- exclusion from specific ideological groups or political parties" (p. 37). Inigo-Mora assumes that parliament constitutes a 'community' within which the MPs discursively construct themselves.

According to Inigo-Mora (2004), pronoun use is an important component of establishing and defining community/communities.

There are two main characteristics that define pronouns: (1) they are always

political in the sense that they imply relations of power; and (2) they are always

involved in struggles over representation (Pennycook, 1994, p. 175). This is the

reason why they represent one of the main rhetorical tools used by politicians, (p.

36)

The first personal plural is contextualized according to the speaker's intention, which, in this debate in the British parliament, amounts to four different categories: inclusive, exclusive, generic, and parliamentary. The investigation into Canadian parliamentarians 11 in their debate over Bill C-50 (2008) reflects the politically-motivated representations uncovered in Inigo-Mora's study.

Although not specific to particular political parties, Ricento (2003) conducted a

CDA-based study on the efforts of early 20th century orators and pamphleteers to rhetorically integrate immigrants into American society and establish an American national character. The study looks at selections from a database of period texts, for a total of five hundred and fourteen pages of text and 266,000 words (Ricento, 2003). The analysis focuses on a variety of genres published between 1914 and 1924, and reveals the rhetorical and pragmatic devices underlying the discourse, along with the discourse strands most often associated with modern political parties.

An extensive investigation of the texts established three discourse strands: conservative, liberal and progressive. Ricento concludes that the "discursive construction of American and Americanism (then and now) are ideologically varied" (Ricento, 2003, p. 633). These three schools of thought form the basis for the immigration debates in the

USA which continue to this day.

The Canadian context is not entirely dissimilar from the American one, although I argue that the three discourse strands (conservative, liberal, and progressive) that Ricento identifies in 'Americanizers' are conflated in Canadian discourse. There is no direct modern Canadian correlation to these three ideals:

'Americanism as an ideological process'... conservative discourse....

'Americanism benefits from the foreign born'... liberal discourse....

'Americanism is an individual matter'... progressive discourse. (Ricento, 2003, p.

630-631) 12

The second ideal is the most pervasive and understood as commonsense in Canadian parliamentary discourse; however, there are strands of the first and third ideals throughout the debate on bill C-50 as well. The majority of the debate, when it is focused on immigration policy, centers on the need Canada has to get immigrants to the country quickly, and to ensure that the people who do come will improve Canada's economy and society.

The perceived 'inherent' need for immigrants to benefit the new homeland leads to a management approach by governments, especially in Western democracies, according to Blommaert and Verschueren (1998). The authors posit that the modern reaction to diversity tends towards the forms of (a) containment and (b) debate. In the former, restrictive efforts to limit immigration in the first place (e.g. through drug testing or prohibitively restrictive application procedures) serve to limit any possible 'problems' from the beginning of the immigration process.

Debating diversity serves the purpose of establishing and refining the terms of management, according to Blommaert and Verschueren (1998). Those who are managed have little or no say in their management:

In the debate on diversity, the tendency to abnormalize the 'other' combines with

the assumption underlying the 'management' paradigm that diversity itself is

somehow abnormal and problematic. The full burden of this double

problematization befalls the immigrant, the 'other' who happens to come to us

rather than to be a long-time neighbor or the object of our own exploration, (p.

20) 13

Additionally, the fact that group identities are regarded as natural or essential and the relationships that exist between these groups are the focus of the authors' inquiries.

The authors conducted their study on the diversity debate in Belgium, and examined the language of such 'tolerant' government discourses as community fliers regarding immigrants and the wording of a police training program. They concluded from their investigations that even the language of tolerance subscribes to "the solid ideological construct... [which they call] the doctrine ofhomogeneism: the belief that homogenous societies are facts of nature" (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998, p. 192). The acceptance of diversity may actually encourage and reinforce difference, which drives groups apart. The authors go on to make recommendations for socio-political change predicated on respect for the individual in society, and predicated on the notion of true equality, unencumbered by the need for the discursive 'them' to become like 'us.'

2.3 Linguistic representation of ethnic minorities in media and political discourses

In his unpublished doctoral dissertation, Velez Salas (2007) examines the local meanings of the terms Hispanic/Latino in newspaper articles; media coverage and transcripts of the Democratic primary debate for the governor of Texas; and amongst selected academics and journalists who identified as either Mexican, Mexican-American,

Chicano/a, or Puerto Rican. Velez Salas used several methods to conduct a thorough examination of the terms outlined above: corpus linguistic, media content analysis, discourse analysis and cognitive discourse analysis - all within a CDA approach. The various data sets give a picture of how the labels Hispanic, Hispano, and Latino/a are realized within these discourses. 14

Following the discourse-society-cognition model proposed in van Dijk (2001),

Vejez Salas (2007) considers society to be comprised of local interactions, such as the news produced by Hispanic and Latino journalists, in addition to the global and political structures encompassing Hispanic and Latino groups. Discourse can be seen as communicative events, e.g. within academia and the media, while (social) cognition is the

'missing link' between discourse and society - mental representations such as identities, opinions, ideologies, etc. - both individual and shared. Velez Salas shows that in uncovering particular elements of discourse, one can determine much about underlying social cognitions.

Along these lines, Velez Salas' (2007) inquiry uncovers the socio-cognitive dimensions of the use of the terms Latino/a, Hispano and Hispanic. Specifically, he finds that individual newspapers' editorial policies contribute to word choice; that Hispanic is more likely to be associated with political topics; that Latino/a is more likely to be used when discussing music and culture; and that the major collocates for Hispanic are Black and community. As for how this reflects the larger society's views of the group, Velez

Salas concludes:

The macro and micro use of Hispanic and Latino erase the differences that a

historical, cultural, and racial hegemonic system has assigned to this

heterogeneous group. Hispanics and Latinos are continuously imagined as

political allies and their specific histories, unique experiences, processes and

practices of their daily lives are unimagined. (p. 180)

This contributes to the message established in the political party, or ideologically driven, arguments uncovered by Ricento (2003) and van Dijk (1993) by showing that 'they' can 15 be put together in a faceless mass, separate from 'us.' My investigation will attempt to uncover the dimensions of the 'us vs. them' mentality in the Canadian parliamentary debate.

The 'us vs. them' construction is not limited to one group outside the 'norm,' however. Baker, Gabrielatos, Khosravinik, Krzyzanowski, McEnery, & Wodak (2008) chose to use CDA and corpus linguistic (CL) approaches to analyze a 140-million-word- corpus of news articles from the UK for the period 1996-2005. The authors determined through both qualitative and quantitative methods how refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (identified by the acronym RASIM in the study) were defined linguistically, along with the topics and attitudes featured in the corresponding discourse.

Articles from both broadsheet and tabloid5, national and regional newspapers were analyzed for collocates of RASIM and for statistically significant differences in the use of the verb pose. The study of collocates revealed that despite very different definitions of the terms refugee, asylum seeker, immigrant, and migrant, there were considerable overlaps in the collocates associated with these terms. The four terms are used nearly synonymously throughout the corpus:

[t]he discourses of RASIM in UK newspapers revolve around a small number of

topics/categories and employ a limited number of topoi, most of which denote a

negative stance... the overlap in terms of categories goes beyond what could be

5 "The tabloid is the prime example of a popular medium where one cannot draw a meaningful distinction between 'information' and 'entertainment'" (Deuze, 2005, p. 861). By contrast, "broadsheet" or "quality" newspapers [are] characterized by extensive political and economic comment" (Carvalho & Burgess, 2005, p. 1460). predicted by the definitions... [and] the extensive overlap is not merely the result

of overlapping senses or conflicting definitions. (Baker et al., 2008, p. 288)

These results seem to reinforce Velez Salas (2007) and others (Oktar, 2001; Vukov,

2003) in confirming the extent to which 'othering' is considered commonplace in media discourses.

2.4 Canadian socio-political environment regarding immigration policies

The Canadian immigration context is addressed by Li (2003). In this analysis of policy statements, public discussions, and academic debates, the author focuses on the notion of integration as "a desirable outcome as newcomers become members of the receiving society, by which the success and failure of immigrants can be gauged and by which the efficacy of the immigration policy can be determined" (Li, 2003, p. 316). This is a notion that is assumed to be absolute and unquestioned, according to Li, who goes on to deconstruct the 'integration assumptions.' Effective integration is one of the main objectives of the proposed changes to the Immigration Act, something which becomes a point of contention in the Bill C-50 debate.

Li (2003) points out that immigration discourse tends towards the idea that even though in theory Canada promotes an official policy of multiculturalism, the reality suggests that quick and easy assimilation to Canadian core values is necessary and desirable for newcomers. Throughout the discourses of official government policy,

"cultural differences are seen as essential and unbridgeable and as eventually leading to a clash with the basic values of a civil society" (Li, 2003, p. 322). Academic discourse tends to focus on either the economic value of immigration and immigrants to Canada or on perceived security threats (see the discussion of Vukov (2003) below). Economic 17 topics range from considering immigrants' financial integration into Canadian society

(Bloom, Grenier & Gunderson, 1995; Reitz, 2005), to considering their earning potential compared to native-born Canadians (de Silva, 1992; Frenette & Morrisette, 2003), to the economic futures of first generation Canadians (Boyd & Grieco, 1998).

As Li (2003) points out, "[economically, immigrants who can match or outperform native-born Canadians' performance are viewed as well integrated, whereas those who fall behind are seen as social burdens" (p. 324). Unsurprisingly, this discourse is reinforced and reproduced within the construction of Canadian national identity at the parliamentary level: immigrants - and 'immigration goals' - are primarily characterized in economic terms.

Canadian immigration policy debates do not just focus on economics, however, as

Vukov illustrates (2003). The media's articulation of immigration establishes which immigrants are (un)desirable by emphasizing fertility and sexuality, in addition to security issues. This is achieved primarily through "mediated panics or celebratory portraits of desirable immigrants" (p. 336).

Vukov (2003) takes the Foucauldian principle of population and governmentality as key to her investigation. Foucault (1991) proposes that a population is "both a biological and political problem" (Vukov, 2003, p. 337) that needs to be solved through management. Governments then regulate the maintenance and health of a population, through public health policies, statistics gathering, and immigration policies. Vukov stresses that in Western democracies immigration policy has become an essential regulatory mechanism for achieving population control. 18

The tension that results from the need for the state to encourage population growth/replenishment and the ongoing consideration as to who does and does not

'belong' is played out in both xenophilic and xenophobic media narratives. These

"articulations are mutually informing facets of a common policy discourse that seeks to select, regulate, and produce the population for the good of the nation" (Vukov, 2003, p.

340). Positive media discourses on sexuality and fertility are presented in the context of

Canada's history of colonial settlers, with the present-day consideration of the diminishing tax base for emphasis. Vukov notes that these narratives are realized in public policy through the processing of immigrant women and children in the Canadian immigration ministry's definition of family class. Conversely, negative media discourses rely on the "implicit threats to the security of the population [which] have become so ingrained as to be rendered a political truism in post-11 September media culture" (p.

344).

Vukov (2003) considers the discursive construction of the categories of immigrants in Canadian policy to be both a reflection of and to have an influence on the media narratives illustrated above. Canadians, she insists, collectively understand their nation as both welcoming and accepting of immigrants, while at the same time panicked at the perceived 'threats' immigrants represent. She concludes with the familiar metaphor of Canada as a house:

Canada [has had a] longstanding biopolitical regulation of the population through

an immigration policy that implicitly links the welcoming xenophilia of the open

front door (as a strategic national interest) to the unwelcoming xenophobia of the

closed back door. (p. 347) 19

The language used by parliamentarians in the debate over Bill C-50 (2008) reflects some of the elements of the narratives of fertility and sexuality, and security, and assumes the principle of governmentality; the NATION AS HOUSE metaphor (Santa Ana, 2002) is also frequently used.

Day (1998) details the discursive construction^ Canada, from its 'natural' history of multiculturalism to the present. He considers the mosaic metaphor to be the rhetorical manifestation of "a desire for a Canadian identity that forever fails to achieve its goal, and thereby achieves its aim, which is to perpetuate itself (p. 43). As Vukov

(2003) does, Day highlights the governmentality of multiculturalism: it is official in that there is a ministry6, an Act of Parliament in 1988 (Mackey, 1999), posters and pamphlets

(which Day discusses in his article), etc. Day also makes clear that Canada's native peoples and the French (Quebecois) have become, like immigrants, governable bodies and potential 'management problems.'

Day (1998) points out that there has been next to no effort made toward understanding how diversity is (re)produced, yet at the same time a lot of attention is placed on defining and managing diversity. Canadian ideas about diversity are based on essentialist notions of identity, that "human identity is a natural expression of an invariable essence," (p. 47) which includes nationality, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

Academically, this tendency toward establishing difference is on the decline as the

"modern couplet essence/identity is being abandoned in favour of the postmodern

6 "[T]he [Trudeau] government appointed a minister responsible for multiculturalism in 1972 and in 1973 established a Canadian Multiculturalism Council and a Multiculturalism Directorate within the Department of the Secretary of State" (Knowles, 2007, p. 220). 20 problematic of eonstruction/hybridity" (p. 48). The essentialist ideas on identity have been challenged repeatedly (see Ricento (2005) for a discussion of socio-cultural ideas relating to identity), but the debate surrounding Bill C-50 (2008) shows evidence of acceptance of the commonsense assumptions based on essentialism.

The Canadian policy of official multiculturalism is an extension of essentialist identities, rooted in the pamphleteering of the early twentieth century. Day (1998) concludes that these pamphlets contributed strongly to the current mosaic metaphor for

Canada by establishing 'otherness' as defined not only by language and country, but also architecture, music, and religion; those differences set against the prairie landscape; and expressed in the well-attested flood metaphor (Santa Ana, 2002). Ultimately, however, according to Day's interpretation of state-sponsored literature up to the present day,

"generations have passed, and still [Canada] doesn't know how to deal with its vast tide of problematic diversity" (p. 56). This uncertainty has lead to Day's suggestion that the most coherent metaphor for Canadian multiculturalism ought to be CANADA AS THE

NATIONAL JEWEL.

Day (1998) goes on to detail why he considers the National Jewel to be the metaphor that best encompasses multicultural reality in Canadian society, particularly as it is reflected in official discourses. He concludes that formal policies have dovetailed in such a way as to create a nations-state (rather than a nation-state) where each and every person both possesses and loses his/her identity - in effect, becoming nothing.

And so, the (impossible) official Canadian says: Since I cannot be either inside or

outside the Jewel, since I cannot penetrate, take possession of, or ignore my

object, I will have to content myself with occupying a place on its surface... 21

immune to incoming floods of Otherness, the world of the National Jewel would

appear to provide the only hope for a solid, rooted existence in a universe gone

wild with diversity, (p. 64)

Diversity is so problematic in Canadian society, Day explains, that the retreat into becoming nothing at all is to be expected.

Mackey (1999) parses the politics of Canadian national identity, especially the rhetoric of inclusion and tolerance.

From colonial times to the present, intellectuals, politicians of every hue, activists,

state institutions, and businesses have sought to define, defend and differentiate

Canadian identity.... The desire for and the necessity for a national identity are

seen as common sense, (p. 9) [italics in original]

Because Canada is a settler nation which must constantly replenish its population,

Mackey sees national identity politics as a constant crisis in need of attention and management. She investigates the iconography of the Canadian north, the

'multiculturing' of First Nations peoples and Quebecois, and the positioning of multiculturalism and Canadian identity during the celebrations of Canada's 125th anniversary and through constitutional crises involving (the possibility of) Quebec's separation from Canada.

From her analysis of Canadian art, media and historical documents, and from her ethnographic investigations, Mackey (1999) concludes that there is evidence of an unmarked, or naturalized, dominant identity: "If Canada is the 'very house of difference', it contains a family with a distinct household head" (p. 9). This is realized in the discourse of 'ordinary Canadians' at the Canada 125 celebrations. Mackey argues that the 22 official government discourses reinforced the whiteness of 'ordinary Canadians,' the power of which is "embodied precisely in the way that it becomes normative" (p. 21).

This is the so-called tolerant, accepting Canada that incorporates 'other' cultures into it.

Mackey (1999) concludes that Canada's tolerance, so mythologized throughout history, is restricted to those who support the supposedly 'neutral' project of nation- building. The Western project of nation-building - using immigrants as 'building blocks'

- gains authority through the presentation of its goals as rational and universal. Mackey stresses that when this project becomes threatened in any way, tolerance disappears.

Intolerance of those who are viewed as a threat to the project... therefore does not

need to be hinged on overt demands for the erasure of difference and cultural

homogeneity. The liberal language of loyalty - loyalty to supposedly neutral and

universal concepts of equality and progress, and to laws and institutions (the key

features of the Western civic nation) - is sufficiently flexible and ambiguous for

this task. (p. 162)

There is a place for the official sanctioning of difference, for many cultures to exist within the nation-building project, provided the members of the 'other' cultures remain faithful to the dominant principles of the nation.

2.5 Relevance for the Bill C-50 debate

The topics outlined above are fundamental to interpreting the analysis of the debate over Bill C-50. From van Dijk (1993), the establishment of an 'us vs. them' mentality toward both immigrants and opposition parties provides a blueprint for the

Canadian context. Inigo-Mora (2004) explores the construction of in-groups and communities within the British parliament through the MPs' use of pronouns. The 23 conservative, liberal and progressive discourse strands uncovered by Ricento (2003) shed light on the similarities and differences between the two main political parties in

Canadian parliamentary discourse. From Blommaert and Verschueren (1998), I consider the possibility of an underlying expectation of homogeneity in the discourse. Velez Salas

(2007) shows how the 'us vs. them' mentality gets characterized for a diverse, yet seemingly undifferentiated, minority group; Baker et al. (2008) expand on this idea for the broader discursive categories of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants.

These political and media-oriented studies from the UK, USA, and Belgium demonstrate how methods associated with CD A can be productively used to unpack societal discourses related to immigrants, immigration, integration, and national identity.

For the Canadian socio-political and economic environment, Li (2003) makes clear that integration and economics are key to immigrants' successes - particularly in government literature and academic papers. This economic focus is evident by the assumptions made by both parties' MPs throughout the debate. From Vukov (2003), I consider the influence of competing media narratives - xenophilic and xenophobic - on the debate. Day (1998) outlines the benefits of immigrants assimilating and integrating at the metaphoric level, concluding that being nothing at all is the Canadian way to deal with the 'threat' of too much diversity. Finally, Mackey (1999) shows how truly non- threatening diversity can be when the government manages and defines it. The Western notions of equality and fairness, rule of law and good government are held as inherently superior to any one 'culture' - disregarding the culture of the dominant (Western) majority, which gets downplayed in an effort to ensure everyone gets along. These 24 portraits of Canadian government, academic, and media discourses give a solid foundation for some of the assumptions evident in the debate over Bill C-50 (2008). 25

Chapter Three: Historical and current context for Bill C-50

In order to provide some background to the overall debate on immigration to

Canada, this chapter will briefly outline relevant early-to-mid-20th century trends and events, and provide a limited history of immigration policy, multiculturalism, and the official Conservative and Liberal positions on both from the late 1960s to the present.

Throughout the Bill C-50 (2008) debate, the underlying assumption is of a continual need for workers in Canada: the replenishment of the country's economic base and the perils of the economic underuse of immigrants' skills have recently become a major concern for the two major federal political parties who have control at any given time over immigration policy (Reitz, 2005). The issue of humanitarian/refugee or familial immigration policies has always been of secondary interest, most particularly to the party in opposition at any given time (Knowles, 2007).

Throughout the proceedings of the second sitting of the 39l Parliament's debate of Bill C-50 (2008), Liberals and Conservatives alike cite different historical precedent for an immigration policy which favours one focus over another - either economic or humanitarian. Members on both sides of the house invoke images from Canada's past to draw attention to a need for stability and controlled growth for a settler nation or to a shameful past record of racism and intolerance. From the Conservatives, the tendency is toward positioning themselves as pragmatists with an ongoing history of fixing the country's immigration problems. As MP Dave MacKenzie, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety representing the riding of Oxford, Ontario, said: "I am pretty proud that this side of the House has righted some of the wrongs on the Chinese head tax.... We have cut in half the immigrant landing fees" (Canada. Parliament. House 26 of Commons, 2008d, time code 71220). For Liberals, their stated pride in being 'the party of Trudeau' harkens back to a radical shift in immigration and other social policies in the late 1960s and 1970s; as John McCallum, member for Markham-Unionville, Ontario, stated: "We on the Liberal side are in the legacy of Pierre Trudeau, and that is why

Canadians will and can trust the Liberal Party when it comes to immigration, because we are the party of immigration" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008i, time code

1050).

How and why each party aligns itself with economic pragmatism or humanitarianism at any particular time is heavily tied to popular opinion and the perceived need for an official opposition to the ruling party's policies (Knowles, 2007).

As a result, the history, both distant and recent, of each party's stance on immigration is more complex than the individual members would suggest through their rhetorical posturing. In this debate, each party attempts to score political points by negatively branding the other side, in addition to defending their own party's stances, both currently and historically. The Liberals invoke the policies of the Reform Party8 regarding

'saturation' levels for Canadian communities taking in immigrants. The CPC counter with accusations of pandering by the Liberals to their constituent base, which is traditionally more diverse than those of Conservative ridings (Gerber, 2006).

MPs on both sides of the House referenced several incidents from Canada's immigration history as examples of a racist past to which Canada should not return,

The Hansard does not contain line numbers; rather, the time is printed in five-minute increments. 8 A now-defunct Canadian political party that, after being renamed the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance in 2000, merged with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in December of 2003 in order "to broaden the electoral appeal of the right" (Godbout & Hoyland, 2009, p. 2) 27 summed up in this quote from Ed Fast, CPC, Abbotsford: "It has been said that those who ignore the lessons of history are bound to repeat them. Let this not be the experience of our great country" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008f, time code 1810).

What follows is a brief outline of (a) some of Canada's 'shameful' past actions with regard to immigration, all of which are invoked during the debate under investigation here; (b) the major shift in immigration policy in the late 1960s under the Liberals; (c) the official policy of multiculturalism; and (d) the Government (CPC) and Official

Opposition (LPC) parties' current stated stances on immigration policy.

3.1 History of immigration

In order to provide context for the current immigration debate, particular incidents from Canada's past immigration history must be reviewed. From amendments to the

Immigration Act designed to limit certain people by race/country of origin, to internment camps during World War II, Canada has a history of immigration policies which do not always meet its current model of a 'fair and neutral' points-based system. All of the incidents described herein were referred to in Question Period by members of the House

- used as rhetorical shorthand for what they hoped not to see in Canada's future, and to highlight that Canadian immigration policy has not always been as 'open' and 'fair' as it is now. Although Canada's immigration policy from the very beginning favoured British settlers (Mackey, 1999), it is incidents of specific racist policies from the early part of the twentieth century that are of interest to the members of the House.

The early days of Canada's immigration policy saw prohibitive policies and Acts which limited the immigration of many different peoples. According to Triadafilopoulos

(2004), an Order in Council prohibiting entrance to Canada those "belonging to the 28

Negro Race" was proposed (although never officially made law) in 1911 (p. 400). Up until World War II, there was a hierarchy of preferred racial groups, established by perceived "climatic unsuitability" (Mackey, 1999, p. 33) of particular groups, such as

Asians and Blacks. Several religious orders, such as the Doukhbors, Hutterites and

Mennonites were, at different times in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically prohibited from entering Canada (Knowles, 2007). At other times, however, travel or economic restrictions are more prevalent, which served the same purpose of limiting particular groups without invoking an explicitly racist agenda.

In 1908, Wilfred Laurier's government passed an amendment to the Immigration

Act known as the Continuous Passage Act, "which did more to virtually eliminate immigration of Indians than any other piece of legislation" (Srikanth, 2002, p. 81).

Immigrants to Canada were required to enter the country directly by travelling from their home country, with no stopovers along the route; this effectively cut off immigration from India, as there was no direct steamship service from that country at the time

(Srikanth, 2002). This provision was challenged in a very visible way six years later:

On May 23, 1914, 376 prospective East Indian immigrants arrive[d] in Vancouver

harbour on board the Komagata Maru, a ship hired by a wealthy Sikh merchant

and contractor from Hong Kong, Gurdit Singh. For two months the vessel lay in

harbour with its human cargo while the legality of a federal exclusion order was

tested in provincial courts. Eventually the Supreme Court of British Columbia

upheld the order and on July twenty-third, with the local citizenry cheering it on,

Canada's HMCS Rainbow escorted the steamer to sea. It returned to Asia minus 29

just a handful of passengers, previous residents of British Columbia allowed to

land by the federal government. (Knowles, 2007, p. 121)

Ruby Dhalla, Liberal MP from Brampton-Springdale, Ontario, put forward a motion on

May 15, 2008 for the House to formally apologise for the incident, saying, "[t]he

Komagata Maru tragedy occurred at a time when our nation had immigration policies that were exclusionary, discriminatory and racist, policies that served to divide our nation and played on our nation's fears" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008f, time code 1820).

Another incident in Canada's immigration history is the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which is commonly referred to in the debates in the house as the Chinese

Exclusion Act or the Chinese Head Tax, although they are technically separate policies.

Chinese workers had been seen as essential for the construction of the Canadian Pacific

Railway, as they worked in dangerous conditions for low pay, with no chance of citizenship rights (Kelley & Trebilcock, 1998). In an effort to limit Chinese immigration after completion of the CPR in 1885, there had been a restrictively high entrance fee for

Chinese newcomers, starting at $50, which was raised to $500 in 1903 (Baines, 2002).

The Chinese Exclusion Act became law on July 1, 1923, and codified this well- established tendency in Canadian immigration policy to limit the number of Chinese immigrants (Knowles, 2007). The act, which remained in effect until it was repealed in

1946, contained such severe restrictions that it has been estimated that only 25 Chinese immigrated to Canada during the 23-year period from 1923-1946 (Knowles, 2007). In

June 2006, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologised to Parliament for the policy and offered 'symbolic' levels of financial restitution to the descendants of Head

Tax payers (Harper, 2006).

The incident involving the S.S. St. Louis is another example of a particularly dark period in the history of Canadian immigration. In June of 1939, the passenger ship with

936 aboard, 907 of whom were Jewish refugees from Germany, was denied entrance to

Cuba, and the United States (Whitaker, 1987). The United States government then dispatched the Coast Guard to follow the ship's passage up the eastern seaboard, in order to prevent it from docking or from any passengers jumping ship and swimming to shore

(Abella & Troper, 2000). Finally, the Canadian government also denied the St. Louis' request to dock at a Canadian port, despite the protests of "some influential Canadians...

[who] sent a telegram to Prime Minister Mackenzie King begging that he show 'true

Christian charity' and offer the homeless exiles sanctuary in Canada" (Abella & Troper,

2000, p. 179). In the end, having exhausted all of their options, the refugees returned to

Europe, where it is estimated that up to two thirds of them were later sent to concentration camps (Abella & Troper, 2000).

During World Wars I and II, German, Ukrainian, Italian and Japanese Canadians were moved from their homes to internment camps in rural areas (Rnowles, 2007). The

Canadian government was particularly harsh in regards to Japanese Canadians after the bombing of Pearl Harbor: approximately 22,000 Japanese Canadians - mostly from

British Columbia - were stripped of their property and sent to live in detention camps in the B.C. interior or to other provinces to work as manual labourers on sugar beet farms

(Rnowles, 2007). Japanese possessions and property were seized and sold by the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property (Kelley & Trebilcock, 1998). After WWII was 31 over, 10,500 Japanese were pressured into leaving for Japan under a 'repatriation' program.

3.2 The 1960s: Shift in immigration policy and multiculturalism

3.2.1 Immigration policy shift

Prior to the late 1960's, there had been a 'White Canada' policy in effect

(Knowles, 2007), and an "imprecisely defined immigration policy and only vague guidelines for implementing it" (p. 194). In 1967, the immigration officials at Department of Manpower and Immigration, under Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, created a system to determine who among unsponsored immigrants should be accepted into

Canada (Kelly & Trebilock, 1998). The system that resulted, with points awarded to potential immigrants in categories such as education, age, employment opportunities in

Canada, youth, and ability to speak English or French, is the basis for the model still in use today for independent class immigrants (DeVoretz, 2001).

Currently, three broad classes of immigrants are stipulated within current

Canadian immigration policy: economic or independent class, family class, and refugee class (Vukov, 2003). The economic class of immigrants (i.e. independent and the sub classes, such as the investor or entrepreneur class) accounts for the majority of immigrants to Canada: in 2008, 63.9% of all immigrants were admitted under that category (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2009).

3.2.2 Multiculturalism

In October, 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau announced Canada was adopting an official policy of'Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework' (Mackey,

1999). The decision was made to advance the policy after the Royal Commission on 32

Bilingualism and Biculturalism, set up by Pearson in 1963 (Knowles, 2007), encountered resistance to the bilingual distinction of Canadian identity. Representatives of non-

English and non-French Canadian communities, such as Ukrainian-Canadian groups,

"rejected the hierarchy of differences implicit in the terms of reference" (Mackey, 1999, p. 64) of bilingualism/biculturalism. The government created a minister and a council to deal with multicultural issues in 1972 and 1973 (Knowles, 2007).

Since the policy "identified some eighty different ethnic or cultural groups which could apply for financial support from various ministries" (Mackey, 1999, p. 64), critics charged that the establishment of an official policy of multiculturalism was little more than an attempt to win votes with Canada's growing immigrant community (Bissoondath,

1994). Moreover, the move was seen as a way to quell the Quebec nationalist movement by "refusing to recognize... the political consequences of Quebecois specificity... reducing] the Quebecois fact to an ethnic phenomenon" (Dufour, quoted in Bissoondath,

1994, p. 37).

As Mackey (1999) points out, Canada has continued to reinforce the policy of multiculturalism by including a line in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) to assure "equal rights that respect the multicultural heritage of Canadians" (p. 67) and establishing the official Multicultural Act in 1988.

3.3 The Conservative government's position on immigration

The official, documented policies of the Conservative Party of Canada on immigration are detailed below, from the party's election platform, to their controversial public advertisements on the legislation under debate. 33

3.3.1 Conservative Party of Canada's platform on immigration

In the time leading up to the election in January 2006 that established the 39f

Parliament, the Conservative Party of Canada's platform on immigration was posted on its website, conservative.ca. As of December 7, 2005, the official policy on immigration was summed up in two bullet points under the section New Canadians: the first stated that immigrants should be allowed to "contribute their best" and not be allowed to "jump the queue" (New Canadians, 2005, para. 1) and the second focussed on "allowing new

Canadians trained in fields like health care to have their professional credentials recognized and used in Canada" (New Canadians, 2005, para. 2). The information in this second bulleted point became expanded into the more comprehensive platform posted a month later.

The archived web site of the Conservative Party of Canada dated January 6, 2006, had a detailed outline of the party's position on immigration under the Issue

Backgrounders, section and the heading An Immigration Plan That Works for Canada.

The platform is almost exclusively built around the need for immigrants to have their professional credentials recognized in Canada. The Challenge section outlines how to integrate new Canadians into "our increasingly knowledge-and service-based economy"

(An immigration plan that works for Canada, 2006, p. 1). The Facts section informs the reader that after a few years of decline, immigration numbers are on the rise, and that over half of immigrants to Canada come as "skilled or independent workers" (p. 1). The complex nature of the regulatory bodies and accreditation processes for new Canadians is also detailed, along with an estimate of how much money immigrants lose by not having their credentials recognized. Toward the end of this section is a mention of the $975 34 landing tax imposed by (then-Prime Minister, and former Finance Minister) Liberal Paul

Martin. The discussion of immigrants until this point is almost exclusively focussed on economic/human resource factors - from both the Canadian public's and immigrants' perspective.

The next section, entitled The Plan, begins with a shift in emphasis: "Canada has long welcomed hard-working, law-abiding men and women seeking freedom, democracy, and opportunity for themselves and their families" (An immigration plan that works for Canada, 2006, p. 2). There is then a detailing of the Liberal Party's failings in regards to immigration - "[they] tolerate queue-jumping, set up special programs for foreign strippers, and hold up legitimate immigration applications in years of red tape"

(p. 2) - and a promise from the CPC to establish an intelligent and equitable immigration policy for Canada. Two of the three bulleted points that follow return to the economic issued outlined above: a promise to cut the landing tax in half and to establish a federal agency for the recognition and assessment of foreign professional credentials. The final bullet point promises to extend Canadian citizenship to children adopted overseas by

Canadian parents - the first and only time this particular issue is addressed, and the only mention of a policy point not directly involving the economic concerns of the country or new Canadians.

The final section, The Choice, repeats the economic-based promises in the first two bullet points above, and offers this as the Conservative campaign's appeal for votes:

New Canadians will be a critical part of making Canada a greater country in the

21st century. New Canadians will best realize their dreams with a Conservative

government that respects their efforts, understands their values, and opens up real 35

opportunities. On January 23rd, new Canadians face a choice. The Liberals

believe immigrants owe them their vote. Conservatives believe that government

owes hard-working immigrants the respect they and their families deserve. (An

immigration plan that works for Canada, 2006, p. 3)

The reference to the idea that Liberals believe that immigrants owe them their votes most likely refers to the multi-ethnic demographic makeup of Liberal ridings (Gerber, 2006). It may also refer to the notion that because the changes in immigration policy and establishment of multiculturalism (outlined above in section 4.2) were spearheaded by

Liberal governments, immigrants should feel 'grateful' and vote Liberal.

The Conservatives' election platform relating to immigrants shows elements of discourse consistent with that in the Bill C-50 (2008) debate. A managerial, distant, perhaps even paternalistic tone is established here, with a focus on the Tories' allowing immigrants to "contribute their best" but forbidding "queue-jumping" (An immigration plan that works for Canada, 2006, p. 2). The name of the party's plan, An immigration plan that works for Canada implies a separation between immigrants and Canada, and in using the verb works, draws focus to the place of immigrants in Canada as workers.

Furthermore, the name of the section, Challenge, implies that immigrants are a problem to be solved, something the Tories repeatedly claim they are best equipped to do. The overall effect serves to reinforce the Conservatives as competent managers.

In addition to the economic and management-focused tone, the Tories also engage in 'us vs. them' tactics - implicitly with immigrants themselves and explicitly with the

Liberals. By stipulating the kinds of immigrants Canada has welcomed in the past -

"hard-working, law-abiding" (An immigration plan that works for Canada, 2006, p. 2) - 36 the reader is reminded who among 'them' can become like 'us.' The Conservatives also remain at arm's length from immigrants: a Conservative government "respects their efforts... understands their values" (p. 2). This presupposes that the efforts and values are not those of the Conservatives - that these efforts and values are something to be observed and admired from the outside.

The Liberals are even more strongly identified as 'others,' the 'them' to the 'us' of the Tories. This is largely to be expected, as this is the election platform of a party attempting to unseat the governing Liberals. This is a positioning that continues strongly even after the parties' roles have reversed, however: the Bill C-50 (2008) debate takes place two years after this document was produced. According to the Conservatives,

'they' (the Liberals) do supposedly illegal/immoral things such as tolerating queue- jumping, setting up programs for foreign strippers and holding up legitimate applications from people who wish to come to Canada.

3.3.2 Advertisements in support of Bill C-50

In May 2008, a controversial series of advertisements outlining the government's amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Act appeared in select ethnic community newspapers such as the Urdu Times, Nigerian-Canadian News, and the free English- language magazine Canadian Immigrant. The controversy stemmed from two opposition

MPs' (Jim Karygiannis (LPC) and Olivia Chow (NDP)) formal objection on May 15

(Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008f) that the government had illegally used taxpayer monies to fund a partisan appeal for support of a bill before the House which

"constituted a contempt of Parliament by presenting misleading information that... obstructed and prejudiced the proceedings of this House" (Canada. Parliament. House of 37

Commons, 2008g, time code 1510). Speaker David Milliken ruled against the objection on May 29, 2008, saying, "[i]n my view, the advertisements clearly acknowledge that these measures are not yet in place. I am therefore unable to find evidence of a misrepresentation of the proceedings of the House or of any presumption of the outcome of its deliberations" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008g, time code 1510).

Opposition MPs continued to question the legitimacy of the advertisements, the details of which are as follows.

The immigration policy amendment advertisement - with text in both English and

French - placed in the May, 2008 edition of Canadian Immigrant starts with the words

"Important Notice," the heading "Reducing Canada's Immigration Backlog" and the official government of Canada logo (Canadian Immigrant, 2008, p. 4). The main body of text opens with the following statement: "Newcomers to Canada have helped build our country from the beginning" (p. 4). It goes on to say that the Government of Canada supports immigration and wants three things: more immigrants to come to Canada, family members to be re-united more quickly and the demands of the labour market to be satisfied. A list follows of the government's plans to reduce the 925,000-person backlog of applications and the up-to-six-year waiting period for an application to be processed:

These important measures, once in effect, include:

More resources: An additional $109 million to speed up the application process.

Faster Processing Times: The ability to fast-track new applications.

Better Employment Opportunities: Matching skills with our economic needs.

Complete Processing: All applications currently in the backlog will be processed. 38

These measures are currently before Parliament. (Canadian Immigrant, 2008, p. 4)

[bold in original]

The ads conclude with a statement indicating that the proposed changes are in accord with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Immigration and Refugee

Protection Act. Before listing the Citizenship and Immigration Canada web site address and toll-free telephone number in bold type, there is a declaration that Canada is in need of an immigration system that is "flexible, fast and fair for everyone," with the final words in bold as well: "that's why we're reducing the immigration backlog" (Canadian

Immigrant, 2008, p. 4).

The advertisement in support of Bill C-50 (2008) references some of the same rhetoric used in the Conservatives' election platform and in the debate in the House, particularly in regards to the issue of 'fairness.' The insistence that the new legislation will ensure a "flexible, fast and fair" (Canadian Immigrant, 2008, p.4) system for all implies that it isn't now - with the added implication that it's the Liberals who allowed this situation to develop. This 'us vs. them' dichotomy is reinforced with the final line of the advertisement. The we in "that's why we're reducing the immigration backlog"

(Canadian Immigrant, 2008, p.4) could mean the parliament or the government in general, but when considered in light of the implied 'they' above, reads as 'we, the

Conservatives.'

3.4 Official Opposition position on immigration

3.4.1 Election platform

The election platform - entitled Securing Canada's Success - put forth by the

Liberals in late 2005 first mentions immigration in a section entitled Meeting Canada's 39

Demographic Challenge (Securing Canada's Success, n.d., p. 8). The context is that the

Canadian birth rate has dropped below replacement levels and the population is aging, leaving Canada with a need for more workers to support the tax base: "By 2015,

Canada's domestic labour force will actually start to shrink, so that all of the net growth will need to come from immigration" (Securing Canada's Success, n.d., p. 8). The

Liberals then promise a combination of approaches to help solve the problems, including providing a strong health care system, balanced budgets on the federal level, and "attract and integrate growing numbers of new immigrants into Canada's communities and economy" (Securing Canada's Success, n.d., p.8). This incorporation of immigration into other government-managed aspects of society is not unusual, and the focus on how immigrants can integrate, particularly economically, is evident in the section outlined below.

In the Welcoming New Canadians section, the Liberals offer a detailed account of their approach to immigration. It begins with the sentence: "In light of Canada's history, values and impending demographic challenge, our immigration policy - particularly as it relates to the selection, integration and regional distribution of new immigrants - is of key importance" (Securing Canada's Success, n.d., p. 19). The selection of new

Canadians is centred on skilled workers, because of their (perceived) ability to "sustain economic growth, promote innovation, and keep city and regional economies strong" (p.

19).

The next paragraphs outline the government's role in ensuring immigrants become successfully integrated into Canada - the Liberals insist that can be better accomplished by identifying those who are most needed (according to the provinces, 40 communities and businesses). They Liberals also recognize the need for new Canadians to have language training, recognition of foreign work credentials, and first job experience in Canada.

The next section provides a bulleted list of specific points and policies the Liberal party claims it will enact if elected:

• Helping immigrants to integrate and succeed - This paragraph contains a

promise of $1.3 billion over five years to improve settlement and

integration programs.

• Fixing the system - The Liberals propose $700 million to reduce the

application backlog and a claim that the system that ensues will be more

responsive and effective.

• Creating an 'In-Canada' class - Here, there are details of how to better

retain and integrate temporary workers and students who are already in

Canada.

• Succeeding in the workforce - This section contains a promise of $260

million over six years to improve the assessment of foreign credentials.

• Bringing Families together - Improving family reunification efforts,

especially in regards to children adopted overseas by Canadians is the

focus of this section.

• Eliminating the 'landing fee' - The Liberals propose a gradual reduction

of the $975 fee charged to new Canadians: cutting it to $600 immediately,

then to $300 after a year, and then to zero within two budget cycles.

(Securing Canada's Success, n.d.) [italics in original] 41

Economics and immigration are clearly tied together in the Liberal election platform, from money for integration programs to the reduction of fees for new Canadians.

As with the Conservatives' platform, the Liberals discuss the immigration 'issue' as one primarily economic in nature. The headings in the Liberals document betray their focus (as the ones in the Tories' platform do) on solving 'problems': immigrants are first addressed in the Demographic Challenge section (Securing Canada's Success, n.d.). One interesting difference between the Liberal platform and the Tories', however, is in the reference to Canada's history as an immigrant-welcoming country. The section entitled

Securing Canada's Success (n.d.) puts three very different issues together when it mentions "Canada's history, values and impending demographic challenge" (p. 19). The

"history" is presupposed to be a positive, welcoming one, with no mention of the types of issues brought up in the Bill C-50 (2008) debate and outlined in section 3.1 above. The

"values," like those discussed in the Conservative platform, are Canadian, and not necessarily shared with immigrants. The difference between this and the Tory platform,

An immigration plan that works for Canada (2006) is subtle: there is no qualifying of

"hard-working" immigrants seeking "democracy" (p. 3).

Overall, however, the documents are actually strikingly similar, and the absence of a strongly paternalistic tone on the part of the Liberals is not enough to draw direct parallels to the kind of rhetoric (that of a strong association with immigrants and their values) they employ in the Bill C-50 (2008) debate. 42

Chapter Four: Methodology

This research project has been carried out within the framework of Critical

Discourse Analysis (CDA) and supplemented with statistical results on material selected according to criteria established in corpus linguistics. In this section, I present both the methods associated with CDA and the models of corpus linguistics relevant to my research. This section ends with an outline of the specific methods used to analyze the data.

4.1 Critical discourse analysis

According to Santa Ana (2002), because CDA is "socially engaged social science," analysts using the approach can help uncover "unjust social practices that reinforce inequalities of wealth or power" (p. 16) when exploring a text. The debate centering on the passage of Bill C-50 makes for a compelling study because inequalities of power- political, social, and economic - are evident in rhetorical and linguistic strategies by political actors. Politically, both parties are courting votes and blaming each other for the large number of immigration applications waiting to be processed, in addition to justifying their own relationships with and policies regarding immigrants; socially, there is an assumption on the part of the Liberals that the Conservatives are still advocating the kinds of control over 'less desirable' immigrants as Reform Party candidates; economically, both parties want 'skilled workers' to solve Canada's labour shortage and contribute to Canada's prosperity.

One of CDA's functions is to lay bare the "relation between society, discourse and social cognition... to examine in detail the role of social representations in the minds 43 of social actors" (van Dijk, 1993, p. 251). As these MPs debate the political justification for the bill, their unquestioned and unexamined beliefs about immigrants come to light in their word choices.

A helpful model for conceptualizing how commonsense assumptions are

(re)produced is the discourse-society-cognition triangle, developed by van Dijk (2001)

(see Figure 1). According to van Dijk, discourse means any communicative occurrence, such as face-to-face interaction (with all of the gestures and intonations that entails) and written texts (including all associated typology and imagery). Cognition includes personal and shared beliefs, goals, evaluations, and feelings. Society is a label that encompasses the global and local structures of a society, including institutions, movements, and the more abstract elements of society.

Society

Figure 1. The discourse-society-cognition triangle (adapted from van Dijk, 2001).

This triangle is appropriate to my study because it illustrates the aspects of the political debate I focus on: (a) the debate within the House of Commons and the resulting transcripts (Hansard) are the discourse in this triangle; (b) the personal identities of the participants as Conservatives or Liberals, or indeed as Canadians, provides the cognition angle; and (c) Canada as a whole is the society relevant to the discourse. Within this framework, I attempt to identify claims that can be made with respect to the cognitions of the participants and the effects these cognitions have on Canadian society. The CDA approach gives van Dijk (2001) a framework for identifying the strategies, both conscious and unconscious, used by power elites to enact and reproduce dominance. Van Dijk defines these rhetorical and linguistic strategies by breaking down discourse in the following way:

(a) Argumentation: the negative evaluation follows from their 'facts.'

(b) Rhetorical figures: hyperbolic enhancement for 'their' [minority group

members] negative actions and 'our' [dominant group members] positive actions;

euphemisms, denials, understatements of 'our' negative actions.

evaluations.

(d) Storytelling: telling above negative events as personally experienced;

giving plausible details above negative features of the events.

(e) Structural emphasis of 'their' negative actions, e.g. in headlines, leads,

summaries, or other properties of text schemata (e.g. those of news reports),

transactivity structures of sentence syntax (e.g. mentioning negative agents in

prominent, topical positions).

(f) Quoting credible witnesses, sources or experts, e.g. in news reports (van

Dijk 1993, p. 264).

Van Dijk (1993) applies the above criteria to the examination of the speech made by a

British MP in 1985, when he spoke on behalf of a school's headmaster who had been unfairly treated by what the MP termed "race relations bullies" (p. 269) (see section 2.2 for further discussion of this analysis). Van Dijk's technical approach to discourse analysis provides the guidelines for establishing a partial list of the assessment criteria I 45 propose for this research; Canadian parliamentarians' language is examined with the above list in mind.

Building on van Dijk's (2001) notions of discourse-society-cognition and expanding on the categories of rhetorical strategies, the Vienna school of CD A situates itself within the larger scope of CDA with a particular focus on the historical context of the discursive acts they investigate. Their approach, known as the discourse-historical approach, goes beyond simple context, however. "[The approach] starts with original documents... is augmented by ethnographic research about the past... and proceeds to wide-ranging data collection an analysis of contemporary news reporting, political discourse, lay beliefs, and discourse" (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000, p. 450). The intent is to trace ideas about national identity through history to establish contrasting and divergent narratives of identity (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999). The historical context is very relevant to the discussion of Bill C-50 (2008): explicit references to past decisions regarding Canadian immigration policy are repeatedly made throughout the debate in the House. Consequently, I endeavour to apply van Dijk's approach within the wider historical perspective reconstructed within Wodak's framework.

Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart (1999) examine the discursive construction of'Austrian-ness' and establish, through a plurality of methods, guidelines for identifying the construction of national identity in general. Throughout the investigation, their focus is on thematic contents, strategies, and means and forms of realization.

Thematic contents include such elements as the linguistic constructions of not only a common culture but also of a political past, present, and future. They make clear that 46 strategies are seen to be conscious efforts to achieve particular political, psychological or other kinds of goals and include justification and relativization, as well as construction.

The means and forms of realization of these strategies are the linguistic evidence of their existence, particularly the use of personal references, such as personal pronouns and quantifiers; spatial references, such as adverbs of place, or prepositional phrases such as

'with us'; and temporal references, such as adverbs of time or temporal conjunctions. For the purposes of this investigation, the strategies listed in Table 1 are of the most interest in determining how the governing Conservatives and opposition Liberals structure their arguments.

Strategies of Justification and Relativization: Legitimation/Delegitimation Argumentation tactics: Realized through: • Appealing to authority; • Quotes • Legitimizing/delegitimizing; • Self-assigning or designating authority; • Claiming opposition has no right to criticize Constructive Strategies: Assimilation, Inc usion, and Continuation Argumentation tactics: Realized through: • Presupposes/emphasizes similarities • Levelling phrases within the nation • References to personal names or • Topoi of comparison with 'others' names of places; • Use of the third person plural we; • Synecdoche, metonymy and personification

Table 1. Rhetorical strategies employed in Austrian national identity debates (adapted from Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999, p. 37).

Following Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart (1999), Ricento (2003) adapts the discourse-historical framework for the analysis of documents containing a variety of 47 speeches, articles, and books produced by Americanizers during the years 1914-1924.

Ricento uncovered examples of constructive rhetorical strategies, which are defined as

"attempt[s] to construct and to establish a certain national identity by promoting unification, identification and solidarity, as well as differentiation" (Ricento, 2003, p.

617).

Additionally, the texts showed evidence of strategies of transformation and perpetuation. The linguistic strategies employed by the Americanizers include the use of first person pronouns to establish group membership; verb tenses and aspect; lack of specificity in some referring phrases, such as euphemisms, rhetorical questions, and passive construction to avoid agency (Ricento, 2003). These two broad strategic categories shape the investigation of Bill C-50 (2008).

The selection criteria for Ricento's (2003) study included those "whose views were most influential in the hegemonic construction of mainstream American identity"

(p. 615) - a group of people referred to in CDA as 'power elites.' The power elites who gave the speeches and wrote the handbooks, bulletins and pamphlets in Ricento's study were civil servants, academics, and civic leaders. Their discourses, as with the parliamentarians in my investigation into Bill C-50 (2008), "can be fruitfully studied as sites in which the work of national identity construction is revealed" (p. 630). Unlike the

Americanizers of Ricento's study, the parliamentarians are not explicitly concerned with deconstructing national identity parameters for new immigrants, but their speeches, when studied in detail, nevertheless reveal commonsense assumptions the parties have about immigrants. 48

4.2 Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics (CL) is a methodology within the field of linguistics which includes a range of application involving a variety of approaches and theories (McEnery et al., 2006). These approaches have as their underlying common component investigations that "are performed on large collections of electronically stored, naturally occurring texts" (Baker et al., 2008, p. 274). A 'naturally occurring text' (or combination of texts, written or spoken) constitutes a corpus, with the added dimension of having some kind of machine-readable code to identify information about the linguistic qualities of said text(s) (McEnery et al., 2006).

Generally, CL research differs strongly from most CDA investigations in that it is more often quantitative, rather than qualitative, in scope; it is more focused on representativeness in sampling, rather than on the integrity of the text itself; and it is more concerned with language per se compared to CDA's focus on meaning and intents

(McEnery et al., 2006). There is, however, a case to be made for combining the two approaches, as well as a growing body of research that incorporates principles and methods from CL and CDA.

Researchers doing qualitative linguistic analysis often have overwhelming amounts of unstructured data; arranging and detailing said material is the province of corpus linguistics and the computer software associated with most CL methods (Popping,

2000). Miles and Huberman (1994) compiled a list of CL's benefits for researchers working in a qualitative framework, including:

• Search and retrieval: locating relevant segments of text and making them

available for inspection. 49

• Data 'linking': connecting relevant data segments with each other, forming

categories, clusters, or networks of information...

• Content analysis: counting frequencies, sequence, or location of words and

phrases;

• Data display: placing selected or reduced data in a condensed, organized format,

such as a matrix or network, for inspection. (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 44)

My use of a concordancer (computer software for counting both word types and token frequencies in a text) in the investigation of the debate over Bill C-50 (2008) was essential in conducting the activities listed above.

A concordancer can be a useful tool in conducting traditionally qualitative-based studies by giving analysts a way to identify representative texts for close analysis (Baker et al., 2008). Baker et al. combined CL and CDA methods in their examination of a 140- million word corpus of British media articles from 1996 to 2006 dealing with the topics of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants. The researchers focused on key words and their collocations to establish semantic and functional relationships to the words around them, along with the metaphors, topic and topoi (i.e. "explicit or inferable premises" (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, p. 74)) in the text. The critical analysis which ensued aimed...

... to explain why and under what circumstances and consequences the producers

of the text have made specific linguistic choices among several other options that

a given language may provide... [T]his justifies the use of CDA rather than

purely descriptive, data-driven approaches. (Baker et al., 2008, p. 281) 50

The mechanical nature of CL-based methods feed into a CDA-based analysis in the debate over Bill C-50 (2008) study by establishing links and patterns for qualitative evaluation.

4.3 Methods

If it is true that a "linguist can never be a detached bystander... [that] he or she exerts direct control over the interaction, and 'constructs' it as an object on the basis of available assumptions" (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998, p. 36), the decisions I have made in how to construct and evaluate my corpus come from the assumptions outlined here. In my investigation I use CL for quantitative analysis, to establish statistics for linguistic patterns and direct my focus toward choice passages for an examination of rhetorical strategies. In particular, I adopt CDA guidelines for identifying these patterns and strategies from van Dijk (2001), by assuming that the cognitions of society will be evident in the discourse. I use Ricento's (2003) outline of linguistic and rhetorical features to uncover those cognitions, and I cast the results within the discourse-historical methods established by Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart (1999).

Constructing a corpus is a highly debated occupation: how many words? Where should the samples come from, in terms of genre ('e.g. interview, narrative, exposition'

(Fairclough, 1995, p. 14)? Will the text samples be representative? Because of the nature of the investigation of the debate over Bill C-50, the corpus size was based on my research questions: In what ways are immigrants linguistically and rhetorically defined in

Canadian parliamentary discourse? How do those definitions change depending on the political affiliation of the speaker? The investigation into these questions began with a search of the Hansard of the Canadian House of Parliament. 51

The Parliament of the government of Canada provides the Hansard of every parliamentary session since the second session of the 35* Parliament, in April 1997 on its web site (Welcome to the Parliament of Canada, 2010). This site links to a searchable database (under the link marked Chamber Business) of all of the debates and proceedings

of both the House of Commons and the Senate of Canada.

Due to the extensive length of the transcripts, the corpus was restricted in the following ways:

• Dates of inclusion. The time period reflecting the open discussion and debate

during the passage of Bill C-50 (2008) spans February 28, 2008 to June 18, 2008.

• Search Terms. The search terms immigration and Bill C-50 were entered into the

search bar on the Government of Canada Hansard listing for the 39l parliament,

2nd session, along with the dates outlined above.

• Political party affiliation. A decision was taken to limit the analysis to statements

made by the MPs representing the Conservative Party of Canada and the Liberal

Party of Canada (the Official Opposition). With one exception, only these two

national parties have formed the government of Canada (although not always the

official opposition) since Confederation (Russell, 2008).

Regarding the latter point, it should be noted that the Liberals had formed the government for over a decade before the Conservatives won enough seats to form a minority government in January of 2006 (History of Federal Ridings Since 1867, n.d). The individual members' comments throughout the debate reflect this recent history, in comments and accusations each made about the opposing party's current and recent governing. 52

The initial creation of the corpus amounted to a simple word search of the

Hansard of the Parliament of Canada online: the terms Bill C-50 and immigration returned 30 pages of pdf results, starting with March 31, 2008, and ending with June 10,

2008. The pdfs were reviewed, and relevant passages (i.e. those dealing with immigrants and immigration) were copied and pasted into Word documents, for a total of 311 pages.

The transcripts were divided into three separate documents - one each for the

Conservatives', Liberals', and NDP/Bloc Quebecois/Independent members' comments; all three documents were also saved as Plain Text Files for use in the concordance software (see below). After eliminating all commentary from members of the New

Democratic Party, Bloc Quebecois and Independents, the remaining 196 pages of Liberal and Conservative comments were then printed, read, and coded for rhetorical and linguistic strategies.

This study is primarily corpus-based rather than corpus-driven in that I am proposing a study of specific language use in a particular context (i.e. a specialized corpus) and not attempting to describe parliamentary language or even English as a whole (i.e. a general corpus) (McEnery et al., 2006). The relatively small corpus which resulted (69, 383 total words) makes for an acceptable study of "frequent linguistic features, [which are] quite stable in their distributions...[S]hort text chunks (e.g. 2,000 running words) are usually sufficient for the study of such features" (McEnery et al.,

2006). Thus, word choice, verb usage, and pronoun distributions are all legitimate linguistic features for investigation. The CL techniques also help establish a map of the corpus, highlighting areas of focus for in-depth analyses (Baker et al., 2008); I have chosen to focus on an in-depth analysis of rhetorical strategies and pronoun use. 53

The particular software used for the word and frequency counts of this debate is

Concordancer for Windows 3.0 (Martinek & Siegrist, 1998). A word count was compiled for both the Conservative and Liberal corpora, and number counts were established for pronouns such as we, us, our, them, their, and they, along with their corresponding antecedents, verbs, and noun phrases.

From the word counts and through extensive readings of the corpus, I identified passages for CDA analysis. After Ricento (2003), I have chosen to present in bold type the rhetorical strategies and linguistic strategies employed by the speakers. The extensive use of quotes by the Conservative party MPs was discovered through reviewing the corpus and confirmed by word counts.

The linguistic analysis was conducted using the word count function in the concordance. The pronouns were counted and then copied into an Excel file, and the surrounding sentences read for context in order to resolve the antecedents. The categories that evolved from this reading were refined to reflect common usage. Canadian as a category was found to have two distinct uses: one including immigrants (or vaguely construed as to possibly include immigrants) or specifically exclusive of immigrants. In some cases, no clear antecedent could be determined, as in the case of phrase such as Let us consider what has happened, where us could mean the individual MPs in the party, the whole of Parliament, or Canadians in general. I chose to code these as 'other.' The 'other' category also tended to function as a 'catch-all' section, to place topics that were only discussed a few times.

It is important to note that the Hansard of the Parliament of Canada is a parallel text. Any time a member of parliament addresses the speaker of the house, he or she may 54 do so in one of Canada's official languages, French or English. As a result, all utterances are translated into the other official language, both simultaneously for broadcast purposes

(Official Languages and Parliament, n.d.) and afterword, for the creation of the Hansard,

Journals and Bills: "[I]t is not enough to produce certain passages in English and others in French or to summarize them in the other official language. Documents must be available in full in both official languages" (Official Languages and Parliament, n.d., section A2). For the purposes of word counts and evaluation, all English translations were considered as English-first-language utterances. 55

Chapter Five: Analysis of the debate over Bill C-50

5.1 Rhetorical strategies

5.1.1 Liberal rhetorical strategies: Construction and perpetuation

One of the main rhetorical strategies of Liberal Party members is the use of personal stories to illustrate membership in the immigrant community. Over the course of the debate, eight different Liberal MPs identify elements of their own or their ancestors' experience as immigrants. The comments involve some common phrases used to indicate group membership/alliance with immigrants, as illustrated in Table 2.

My family Many of us Everyone in Member of Parliament/ I am an came/would As an who have this House is Riding immigrant not have been immigrant come to this an immigrant able to come country Maurizio Bevilacqua S (Vaughan) Sukh Dhaliwal V S (Newton-North Delta) Hedy Fry S (Vancouver Centre) Gurbax Malhi S (Bramalea-Gore-Malton) Maria Minna •' (Beaches- East York) Joyce Murray S (Vancouver Quadra) Yasmin Ratansi S S S (Don Valley East) Robert Thibault •/ (West Nova)

Table 2. Liberal MPs' use of levelling components.

All of these stories show evidence of a constructive strategy, with a

"presupposition/emphasis on intra-national sameness/similarity, including the strategy of

'we are all in the same boat'" (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999, p. 37). This is 56 realized through levelling phrases, used to identify with the group in question

(immigrants to Canada) and indicated in the columns above.

Most of the work on national identity construction shows this rhetorical technique as something speakers use to distance themselves from immigrants (van Dijk, 1993;

Verschueren, 1995; Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999); the Canadian experience on the Liberal side of the House seems to be constructed such that the MPs show a strong sense of identifying with immigrants. A close read of one of these stories will provide a more detailed picture of what is happening rhetorically in these accounts.

I have chosen to extract and analyze MP Yasmin Ratansi's comments because, as evident in the table above, her comments have the most in common with the others in terms of phrasing and rhetoric. After Ricento (2003), I have chosen to present in bold type the linguistic and rhetorical strategies employed by the speaker. Ratansi's first comment took place in the House on June 2, 2008, a week before Bill C-50 (2008) was to be given its third reading before going to the Senate for final approval. Her comment is not a detailed personal story, but rather a reflection on 'what Canada is':

Canadians know that Canada has been and continues to be the first choice for

immigrants all across the world. I am an immigrant myself. The consequences of

living in countries where the political environment is not conducive, or where

citizens are expelled just because of their creed or colour, is a very devastating

experience. Hence, we are fortunate to live in [a] country like Canada, which is a

pluralistic society that respects diversity. It respects the diversity of its citizens. It

does not just tolerate it but respects it. (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons,

2008h, time code 1230) 57

Ratansi's main point (or global construct) here is to establish why Canada is the "first choice for immigrants all across the world," as her opening statement declares.

"Canadians know" indicates a fact, both in meaning and in form: the simple present tense of "know" reinforces the 'factual' proposition that follows. The phrase "Canada has been and continues to be" contains a present perfect tense and another simple present tense to presuppose that there is a continuous line (of immigrants choosing Canada first) that began in the past, continues in the present, and will continue through the future in an unbroken line. This active 'be-ing' implies a living connection to the past, evidence of a strategy of perpetuation. Without any citation or reference as to where she got this

'fact,' Ratansi begins with a commonsense assumption about immigration to Canada.

Next, Ratansi provides the levelling component indicated above (and expressed by two other MPs in Table 2) by identifying herself as an immigrant. With the declaration

"I am an immigrant myself," she adds the entailment that she is an expert on the subject of immigration to Canada. This makes for a kind of self-referring appeal to authority.

The speaker's use of myself adds emphasis to her individuality, contrasts with the use of immigrants as a plural noun in the sentence before, and sets up her implied personal involvement in the vaguely defined instances she recounts next. Rantansi's lexical choice of the word consequences is telling: consequences are often dire. The audience is left to speculate as to what exactly the consequences are (other than "very devastating") of

"living in countries where the political environment is not conducive [sic]." With no 'to + object' after conducive, the audience must attempt to guess what the political environment does not support. 58

Another strong lexical choice is citizen. Using a strategy of vagueness, she explains that these unnamed countries expel citizens "just because of their creed or colour," not only emphasizing a sense of injustice {citizens belong to their countries in much more defined way than people do, and their expulsion is a forceful action), but also implicitly excluding Canada - something she reinforces with her next statement. To contrast with the perceived shocking injustice of exile based on "creed or colour," the use of "hence" serves to directly relate the previous collection of vague, foreboding sentiments with the positivity of Ratansi's final statements. The inclusive personal pronoun we reinforces the speaker's relationship to immigrants, but it also implies a formation of an 'in group' vs. 'out group' mentality regarding Canada vs. other countries

(that expel their citizens and/or don't respect diversity). We, therefore, meton\ mically encompasses Rantansi, her immediate audience in Parliament, immigrants, and

Canadians. That we are fortunate is presented as a fact, as is the definition of Canada as a

"pluralistic society that respects diversity." 'What Canada is,' Ratansi says, is the number one choice for immigrants around the world, because of this respect for diversity. The word citizens is used again for contrast with those previously mentioned 'other' countries. The simple present tense is repeated three times - respects - to drive home the contrast. The first use of it is a metonymy representing Canada and its government or citizens; the next two uses of it take diversity as their antecedents. The repetitive use of respects, especially in contrast with tolerates, brings to a conclusion the overall strategy of transformation, specifically of positive self-presentation, reinforcing the overall message of Ratansi's speech, which is why Canada is the first choice for immigrants around the world. 59

The next two speech excerpts came from a speech Ratansi gave in the House of

Commons on June 6, 2008. Again, her comments do not reveal extensive personal details, but rather continue on the theme of 'what Canada is,' and how it developed:

Canada is a land of immigrants. Everyone in this House, with the exception of the

aboriginal people, is an immigrant, whether one came here three years ago, or

one's ancestors came here 300 years ago. It has been through thoughtful debate

and discussion that our immigration policies have evolved. Immigrants are here to

stay and the government cannot cherry-pick whom it wants.

In previous years immigrants were brought in for specific labour purposes and we

have seen the repercussions of that. Canada, having learned lessons from its

immigration policies and its stand on immigration since World War I and World

War II, has become more thoughtful. As a nation we have become more

thoughtful. It has been Liberal prime ministers, such as Prime Minister St.

Laurent, who started the formal process of immigration from European countries.

As an immigrant myself, I remember well that it was Prime Minister Pierre Elliott

Trudeau who opened immigration from countries other than European countries.

(Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008j, time code 1050)

The global construct of this speech involves what Canada is, and how it came to be. As in the June 2 excerpt, Ratansi begins by stating a 'fact,' that "Canada is a land of immigrants," a proposition reinforced by its use of the simple present. If the 'fact' is taken as such, then the next sentence both confirms and contradicts it. "Everyone in this

House... is an immigrant" employs the strategy of unification by the use of a levelling 60 statement, yet the prepositional phrase embedded in the middle of this sentence is cast as an aside, something almost not worthy of mentioning. Compounding this lack of emphasis is the homogenizing use of the phrase "aboriginal people," rather than peoples ox First Nations, implying that 'they' are all of one background. If First Nations MPs are an exception to 'what Canada is,' the audience is left to infer what that means for their position as Canadians. The use of the pronoun "one" in the next sentence excludes them even further, but indicates a levelling of every single other person in the House.

"Whether one came here three years ago or one's ancestors came here 300 hundred years ago," Ratansi insists, everyone, except First Nations peoples, is equal. The passive verb and the nominalizations used in the next sentence serve to mask agency: "It has been through" + "debate and discussion" reveals nothing of who did the debating and discussing. And yet, as a result, "our immigration policies have evolved" - where the possessive pronoun our represents Canadians. The implicature underlying the

"evolved" policies is twofold. First of all, there are the rationalist, Western notions of history as a continually evolving process of improvement over time through the acquisition of knowledge. Secondly, the metaphor implicit in the "evolved" policies is that of a living species that can, over time, change or adapt for the better. "Immigrants are here to stay" is a difficult statement to parse; it seems to be a piece of empty rhetoric - another 'fact' couched in the simple present. The implication is that Canadians cannot ask immigrants to leave, or that government policies encouraging immigrants to come to

Canada are permanent and cannot be undone (especially considering the 'evolution' of said policies to a point of perfectibility.) The metaphor which follows - "the government cannot cherry pick whom it wants" - casts the government as a farmer and potential 61 immigrants as fruit. The selection process as an arbitrary force with possible poor motives on the part of the (Conservative government) selectors runs counter to Ratansi's ideas of 'what Canada is.'

The next section of the text starts with a return to the strategy of vagueness through the use of the passive voice ("were brought in") which masks agency. The unknown subject(s) (perhaps Canadians in the 'unevolved past?') needed immigrants for

"specific labour purposes," a phrase which, despite the use of the term specific, is actually quite vague. The lexical choice of repercussions, especially when coupled with the metonymic use of "we" to mean "present-day Canadians," indicates that although there were no well-defined actors in the previous sentence, there is a recipient of their actions. Canada is personified in the next sentence, in order for it to learn "its lessons," in a strategy of transformation on the speaker's part. History is a teacher is a common trope in national identity and immigration debates (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, &

Leibhart, 1999), and ties in with the aforementioned rationalist ideals of improvement through time and knowledge. Ratansi then names past Liberal prime ministers who were responsible for what she considers improvements to immigration policy: "Prime Minister

St. Laurent, who started the formal process of immigration from European countries"

(Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008j, time code 1050). Interestingly, it was

John Diefenbaker, a Conservative prime minister, who "virtually abolished the White

Canada policy, a policy that had been clearly sanctioned and pursued by every Canadian prime minister from John A. Macdonald to Louis St. Laurent" (Knowles, 2007, p. 188).

Ratansi goes on to imply her own, personal gratitude to the government figure she believes is responsible for her immigration to Canada by prefacing the reference to Pierre 62

Elliot Trudeau with "As an immigrant myself, I remember well..." "As an immigrant myself lends authority to the "facts" presented here. The reflexive pronoun, followed by the first person singular subject pronoun reinforces the nature of her personal experience as one of the beneficiaries of Liberal immigration policy. She finishes by saying immigration was "opened," as though it were a door on a hinge; the metaphor of

CANADA AS A HOUSE is a common one throughout this debate. This text excerpt moves from agentless passives ("were brought in") through personification ("Canada, having learned lessons") to metonymic subjects ("as a nation, we") to naming those responsible for immigration policy improvements (St. Laurent, Trudeau) to those who benefited from said improvements (the speaker herself).

Ratansi's utterances dovetail with another strategy, that of perpetuation (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999). This strategy is used in connection with the discourse involving 'what Canada is,' which is implicitly ideological and partisan.

Liberal MPs define Canada as "a land of immigrants" (Canada. Parliament. House of

Commons, 2008j, time code 1050) and their party as "the party of immigrants" (Canada.

Parliament. House of Commons, 2008i, time code 1050). This discourse also appears in four of the other stories, either before or after the personal comments, showing a need to link the personal narrative elements to an overarching narrative of Canadian identity.

Interestingly, an attempt to shame the Conservative side also employs this kind of levelling tactic. Raymonde Folco (Laval West) said on June 6, 2008:

I find it especially hard to accept that some members opposite, on the government

side of the House, who came to Canada as immigrants through this equal

opportunity, are now closing the door behind them in a way by voting with the 63

Conservative Party. They came to Canada and now they are saying too bad for

those who want to come behind them. They are closing the door. (Canada.

Parliament. House of Commons, 2008j, time code 1025)

Folco is using language similar to that of the Liberal MPs telling their own stories - only she is directing her comments to the governing Conservatives. Her effort here serves to shame those members of the CPC caucus who are immigrants to Canada for not criticizing their party's efforts to change the Immigration and Refugee Act. In effect, she is criticizing them for not being Liberals: they are seen as taking advantage of the 'equal opportunity' (read: points-based immigration system) afforded them by Liberal policy, but not extending it to those who come after them.

A search in the transcripts of the Conservative members' speeches for the phrases listed in Table 1 returned no results. A careful review of the transcripts revealed no personal stories/comments of the kinds the Liberal MPs gave. The closest possible comparison is in a comment made by Deepak Obhrai, MP for Calgary East, who said on

April 17, 2008:

[t]hose members [of the NDP] should talk to the people. They should talk to my

friends. People complain every day about how terrible the system is, how they

cannot get their loved ones into this country, how they cannot get workers into

this country, how they cannot get skilled workers into this country. (Canada.

Parliament. House of Commons, 2008e, time code 1345)

The underlined section may imply that Obhrai is a member of a community that is either made up of, or has contact with, immigrants to Canada; the last two phrases of the final sentence, however, indicate that his friends may be members of the business 64 community, who need immigrants as workers. This passage is the only (possible) evidence shown by a Conservative MP of an immigrant self-identifying as such.

5.1.2 Conservative rhetorical strategies: Justification and relativisation

Both the Conservatives and Liberals use appeals to authority to support their arguments during the debate on Bill C-50. There are some common rhetorical strategies

(e.g. using quotes from MPs of the other party to 'shame' each other; a reliance on immigration 'experts') and some unique ones, such as the reliance on newspaper editorial writers' opinions or those of'everyday people.'

MPs on both sides of the House quoted the other party's members: for example,

Ed Komarnicki quoted Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the Liberal MP for Etobicoke Centre: "I'm almost reaching the point where I believe that our whole immigration system has become dysfunctional. That in fact it's at the point of being broken" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008c, time code 1015). Several Liberal MPs quoted Prime Minister

Stephen Harper as having talked about "people who live in ghettos and are not integrated into Canadian society" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008i, time code

1050). Liberal MPs also quoted the mandate of the Canadian Immigration and

Citizenship web site, along with immigration numbers from Statistics Canada;

Conservative MP Peter van Loan quoted extensively from the parliamentary procedure handbook and precedent rulings in regards to the formal motion against the advertisement money the government spent (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008f, time code

1515). I have chosen to discount these common, 'internal' sources of authority, and instead focus my discussion on the tactics unique to the parties, especially the use of quotes from sources outside Parliament. 65

Conservative tactics differed from those of the Liberals in that instead of focussing on personal stories and identifying with immigrants, the Conservatives chose to quote almost exclusively from sources of external authority. Both parties' MPs read quotes into the record, with the Conservatives showing a marked preference for this tactic in terms of the overall percentage of quoted words, 896 (quoted words) out of 20,204

(total words) vs. the Liberals' 681 (quoted words) out of 49,179 (total words) (see Figure

2).

CffiS

•SeAitMted wards

lax ps. I pr (Vimmiiitmt

Figure 2. Conservative versus Liberal use of quoted material.

The confidence intervals for the relative frequency of quoted material were determined as a way of accounting for uneven corpus sizes. At 49,179 words, the Liberal corpus is 2.43 times larger than the 20,204-word Conservative corpus. Confidence intervals have been championed as a way to improve the statistical rigor of corpus linguistic studies as they provide an "alternative approach to significance testing proper"

(Gries, 2006, p. 200). By establishing the confidence intervals for the proportions of quoted words, and for the pronouns in section 5.2, we "can know with 95% confidence that the mean score of a sample will fall in the interval of the true population mean plus- 66 or-minus the tolerable error" (Biber, 1993, p. 253). The confidence intervals for the two samples of quoted material for the Conservatives and Liberals did not overlap

(Conservatives: 4.15% - 4.72%; Liberals 1.28% - 1.49%); therefore, we can compare the percentages of the two uneven samples.

The quoted material in the Conservatives corpus came almost exclusively from newspaper editorials (favourable to their policy changes) and immigration experts (see

Table 3).

Editorial: Editorial: Editorial: Member of Parliament/ Vancouver Winnipeg Globe and Experts Cabinet Position or Riding Province Free Press Mail Diane Finley S S S •• (Minister of Citizenship & Immigration) Rick Dykstra S (St. Catharines) Ed Komarnicki (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of SS SSS V Citizenship & Immigration) Brian Jean (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of S Transportation, Infrastructure & Communities)

Table 3. Conservative appeals to external authority.

Examples of the kind of experts quoted during the debate are James Bissett

(former director of Canadian Immigration Services and a Canadian diplomat); Wojciech

Sniegkowski (president of the Canada-Poland Chamber of Commerce in Toronto); and

Shirish Chotalia (immigration lawyer).

As with the newspaper editorials, the quotes from experts are all in favour of the proposed changes in legislation, such as the following from Warren Creates on April 3,

2008: "This is a very clever landmark change, I would call it, in overhauling the 67 immigration program... it makes a minister accountable for explaining it and reporting to

Parliament and therefore to the Canadian public" (Canada. Parliament. House of

Commons, 2008b, time code 1230). Ed Komarnicki chose Warren Creates' quote to include in the discussion because it praises the Conservative policy change, but the quote also presupposes that the immigration program is need of "overhauling." In every one of the quotes taken from editorials, there is this assumption; in fact, in several cases, there are also explicit indications of why this presupposition is assumed - the Liberal party is to blame. As the Winnipeg Free Press editorial states, "[T]he ugly truth [is] that it was the Liberals who created the problem" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008b, time code 1015).

Experts' quotes are not unusual, however, and are used by the Liberals (in lesser amounts) to attack the Conservative plan (see Table 4 on page 70); in fact, Warren

Creates is quoted later in the debate by the Liberals, indicating that he had changed his mind on the proposed reforms. Quotes from newspaper editorials are a uniquely

Conservative rhetorical strategy; the most repeated quotation sheds light on the governing party's main rhetorical strategy, that of justification.

The Conservatives quote the Winnipeg Free Press editorial six times; the following phrase from that one editorial is quoted five times: "Canadians, new and old, have been offered a clear choice: Conservative policy that will benefit Canada, or politics that will benefit Liberals" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008b, time code

1015). The first part of the sentence simultaneously unites and divides Canada -

"Canadians" means all its citizens - but this is modified by post-nominal adjectives new and old. This serves to remind the audience that there are different types of Canadians: 68 old and new do not refer to the age of Canadian citizens, but rather refer directly to residency in the country - 'new Canadian' is a common term for recent immigrant. This serves to establish an 'us and them' division. The cataphoric use of "clear choice" sets the audience up for another carefully constructed division, of "Conservative policy" contrasted with "Liberal politics." The pairing of policy with Conservative gives an air of neutrality to the Conservative side, as though there are no politics involved in their development of immigration policy, which contrasts with the Liberals' "politics." The two phrases mirror each other with the repeated use of the phrase "that will benefit." The

Liberals benefit syntactically, as the object of the verb phrase will benefit, and semantically, as the beneficiaries of the politics they employ, rather than the supposedly neutral policy Conservatives develop. The repeated use of this particular quote is evidence of the Conservative strategy of justification and relativisation; the use of quotes serves to legitimize their own efforts, and/or delegitimize the opposition's criticism of same.

The Liberals chose to read quotes into the record from experts such as Naeem

Norani, the publisher of the newspaper The Canadian Immigrant; Morteza Jafarpour, executive director of the Settlement and Integration Services Organization; and Warren

Creates, the immigration lawyer quoted by the government side on April 3, 2008.

Creates' quote was extensive - by far, the longest and most detailed of all the Liberals' quotes - and contained this refutation of both his earlier comment and the Conservatives' proposed changes:

We're going to see in this legislation the erosion of the sacred rule of law principle

that this country is built on. Democracy is shrinking because of Bill C-50. 69

Processing priorities, which we have already decided by a tried, tested, and true

established and transparent parliamentary procedure for both legislative and

regulatory change, will now be reduced to stakeholder input. (Canada. Parliament.

House of Commons, 2008i, time code 1525).

This quote directly reverses the praise he had given earlier to the proposed policy change; it had been assumed in his first quote that the amendment to the Immigration Act would be an improvement to democratic efforts, by making a minister responsible directly to the Canadian people.

The Liberals relied on experts to a lesser degree than the Tories and do not read quotes from newspaper editorials supportive of their position or critical of the government's. It should be noted, however, that this was not for lack of newspaper editorials to quote: on April 10, Joyce Murray, MP for Vancouver Quadra, lists the names of several papers that were "ringing alarm bells" about the amendment to the immigration act, including the Toronto Star, the Regina Leader-Post, and La Presse, among others

(Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008d, time code 1250).

The Liberals do, however, employ an interesting rhetorical strategy related to justification. This tactic is unique to their party; more accurately, it is particular to one member, Garth Turner, the member for Halton. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this tactic is the fact that Garth Turner is a former Conservative MP (Tardi, 2007).

As can be seen in Table 4, Turner chose to quote extensively from "some of the people from across the country who overnight last night asked [him] to read some of their comments into the record" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008b, time code 70

1100). These six people, whom he later describes as "citizens" and "taxpayers of

Canada," are neither experts nor editorialists.

Member of Parliament/ 'Ordinary People' Experts Riding Garth Turner VSSSSS (Halton) Gurbax Malhi ,/ (Bramalea-Gore-Malton) Mario Silva S (Davenport) Joyce Murray S (Vancouver Quadra) Yasmin Ratansi ,/ (Don Valley East) Andrew Telegdi • (Kitchener-Waterloo)

Table 4. Liberal appeals to external authority.

Overall, although the quoted material makes up a very small percentage of the transcripts under examination, the very clear preferences shown by each party in terms of rhetorical strategy is interesting. These preferences will also form a basis for trends in linguistic strategies.

5.2 Linguistic strategies: Pronouns

Pronouns are a fruitful area of investigation in political debates because

"especially in discourse about Others, [pronouns] signal ideological or social distance between the speaker and the Others" (van Dijk, 2001, p. 29). Additionally, research studies have shown that intergroup biases can be reinforced through pronoun use (Perdue et al., 1990); the parliamentary community and the communities established by the individual political parties are established and reinforced through the use of the third person plural (Inigo-Mora, 2004). Both Liberal and Conservative MPs use pronouns to 71 establish and strengthen relationship within and across groups, from the political parties themselves to immigrants, Canadians, and Parliament.

A concordance analysis of the pronouns used in the two sub-corpora of

Conservative and Liberal speeches in the debate over Bill C-50 revealed some clear differences in the way that both parties use pronouns. The overall number count was established for each of the pronouns our, their, them, they, us, and we (see Table 5). A careful review of the transcripts established the antecedents for each of the pronouns (see

Figures 3-8).

Conservatives Liberals Pronoun Raw Number Percentage Raw Number Percentage

our 135 0.668 182 0.37

their 61 0.302 135 0.274

them 51 0.252 86 0.175

they 210 1.039 306 0.622

us 44 0.218 111 0.225

we 276 1.366 601 1.222

Total word count: 20,204 Total word count: 49,179

Table 5. Overall number of pronouns used by Conservatives and Liberals.

As a whole, the numbers are not particularly different: with the exception of our and they, the Conservatives and Liberals use pronouns in almost equal numbers. When the antecedents are resolved, however, it is clear from the use of pronouns that the two parties are framing the Bill C-50 debate in two very different ways. 72

The following section outlines the parties' usage of pronouns in light of 'we'

(Figures 3, 4, and 5) vs. 'them' (Figures 6, 7, and 8) group constructions (Gumperz,

1982; van Dijk, 1993). The categories' numbers represent percentage use of the pronoun in question - for example, in Table 5, the Conservatives' total use of the pronoun 'our' was 135, and their specific use of that term to mean Canadians, exclusive of immigrants, was 50. 50/135 = 37%.

The confidence intervals for each percentage were calculated (see section 5.1.2) and compared. For example, in the case of the pronoun 'our,' the Conservatives' use it to mean Canadians, exclusive of immigrants, 37% of the total number of times 'our' was used. The confidence interval for the Tories' use of this word is from 28.9% to 45.2%, meaning we can say with 95% certainty that if the sample size were increased, the average would fall within that range. The Liberals used 'our' to mean Canadians, exclusive of immigrants 55.5% of the time, which has a confidence interval of 48.3% and

62.7%. Because those ranges do not overlap, the results are statistically significant

(Biber, 1993).

5.2.1 Pronoun use: First person plural pronouns and possessive adjective

The inclusive (of immigrants) use of the term Canadians is frequently the domain of the Liberal party, who use it twice as many times as do the Conservatives to indicate ownership with the possessive adjective our (26% vs. 12%) and 10 times as much for the subject pronoun we (16% vs. 1.5%). This linguistic strategy, of the party members discursively aligning themselves with immigrants (by including them in their definition of Canadians), fits with the rhetorical strategy outlined in section 5.1.1. 73

Conservatives' and Liberals' Use of Our

60.0%

50.0%

40.0%

30.0%

20.0%

10.0%

0.0%

: -10.0% i Libs 1 Cons Cons Libs Cons Libs Cons I Libs Cons Libs Upper Confidence Interval 45.2% 62.7% 17.3%: 32.2' /to 56.6% 11.6% 3.5% jlO.9% 3.5% 6.6% Percentage 37.0% 55.5% 11.9%i25.8% 48.1% 7.7% 1.5% ! 7.1% 1.5% 3.8% Lower Confidence Interval 28.9% 48.3% 6.4% 19.5%! 39.7%; 3.8% -0.6% : 3.4% •-0.6% ^ 1.1%

p & p is a 53 f/3 -o T3 •c es 2 CO a Ca n Ca n (Inc l Par h (Exc l Liberal s Conser v

Figure 3. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Our.

The exclusive use of the term Canadians is essentially the same across parties,

(no statistically significant differences for 7/5 and we) except for the Liberals' use of 6ur, which occurs somewhat more frequently than the Conservatives' use of the term (55% vs.

37%). As noted in the methodology, any time immigrants were explicitly discussed in the sentences surrounding the term Canadians, the exclusive label was applied. 74

Conservatives' and Liberals' Use of Us

80.0% 70.0% 60.0% 50.0% 40.0% 30.0% 20.0% 10.0% 0.0% -10.0% Cons Libs Cons Libs Cons i Libs ; Cons Libs Cons Libs Cons Libs Upper Confidence Interval 20.7 15.5 14.3 26.2 67.0 | 15.5 10.0% 19.9 10.7 54.3 37.8 5.7% Percentage 11.4 9.9% 6.8% 18.9 52.3 [ 9.9% 10.0% 13.5 4.5% 45.0 25.0 2.7% Lower Confidence Interval 2.0% 4.4% -0.6 11.6 37.5 I4.4%l0.0% 7.2% -1.6 35.8 12.2 -0.3

2S C/3 S 2 CO P o T3 C/D CO CO lu s CO lu s •s re CO CO H c C r>

u (Ex c o ns e e. ns e o o CJ hJ CJ ibera l

Figure 4. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Us.

The Conservative MPs overwhelmingly use the third person plural pronouns to refer to themselves as part of their political party. The use of our (48%), us (52%), and we (58%) to mean Conservatives indicates the MPs' strong affiliation with their party, and is strikingly high compared to the Liberals' use of the terms to self-refer: our (8%), us (10%), and we (12%). This ties into the Conservatives' rhetorical strategy of justification through the use of appeals to authority (as outlined above in section 5.1.2) by reinforcing party unity, which fits in with the authoritative stance the Conservatives take. 75

It also speaks very strongly to a pattern of in/out-group identity, with the two political parties (or more accurately, the governing Conservatives and the opposition parties), rather than immigrants/Canadians, serving as the binary construction.

Conservatives' and Liberals' Use of We 70.0% i : i 60.0% l ! JL. | \ \ 50.0% 1 | 40.0%

\ -"* 1 30.0% r* ! , tii 1 20.0%

10.0%

0.0% Cons I Libs | Cons I Libs I Cons i Libs I Cons I Libs I Cons I Libs Upper Confidence Interval 164.1% 114.2% 129.7% 123.5% i 2.9% 118.7% 112.9% 132.4% i 9.0% |26.8%( Percentage 58.3% 11.6% 24.6% 20.3% 1.4% 15.8% 9.4% 28.8% 6.2% 23.5% Lower Confidence Interval 152.5% I 9.1% 119.6% 117.1% ! 0.0% ! 12.9% I 6.0% 125.2%: 3.3% ,20.1%.

W5 R S % "^ eCO S3 •s t/2 > J2

^ lu s us i

ad i ad i CO Ca n Ca n

I Parl i (Exc l iberal s onser v u j Figure 5. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of We.

It is interesting to note that Liberal MPs are far more likely than Conservatives to use pronouns to speak of themselves as parliamentarians: nine times more often for us

(5% vs. 45%), and three times as much for we (9% vs. 29%). This may be expected, however, as the Liberals, as the party not currently serving as government, can further appeal to authority by referencing the institution of parliament, rather than a governing power position, as the Conservatives do. 76

5.2.2 Pronoun use: Third person plural pronouns and possessive adjective

The inclusive use of the term Canadians in the third person plural pronouns/possessive pronouns is used much less frequently overall: it accounts for less than 10% of usage for they, and only occurred once in each corpus for them. This is to be expected, as the parties are not discussing Canadians very much at all when they use third person plurals (the exclusive use is almost never used), and they are including themselves in these referents. The parties are choosing instead to construct very clear 'other' groups.

Conservatives' and Liberals' Use of Their 80.0%

70.0%

60.0%

50.0%

40.0%

30.0%

20.0%

10.0%

0.0%

-10.0% Cons Libs Cons Libs Cons Libs Cons Libs Cons Libs j Upper Confidence Interval 33.5% 21.7% 68.2% 61.0% 4.8% 9.9% 17.3% 3.5% 17.3% 31.7% | Percentage 23.0% 15.6% 55.7% 52.6% 1.6% 5.9% 9.8% 1.5% 9.8% 24.4% Lower Confidence Interval 12.4% 9.4% 43.3% 44.2% -1.5% 1.9% 2.4% -0.6% 2.4% 17.2%!

o y C ; •^2 2 •£ Sa (JO TO o •a <]> re a •J C3 c Figure 6. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Their. 77

Conservatives and Liberals are speaking about each other in not dissimilar amounts, considering the use of their and they: 22% (Conservatives) vs. 16% (Liberals) and 30% (Conservatives) vs. 27% (Liberals), with no statistical difference indicated.

When the other main opposition party is included in the numbers, however, the

Conservatives' use of third person plural pronouns shows a strong preference for identifying a 'them' that is decidedly political. If the Conservatives use of their/them/they includes references to the Liberals, NDP, and Liberals and NDP together, the results are dramatically different - Conservatives refer to the political 'others' 32% of the time for their, 20% for them, and 41% for they. The Liberals combined totals for all other parties are only 1-2 percent higher than when they were talking about the Conservatives alone.

Conservatives' and liberals' Use of Thau 80,0 % 70. 0% 60,0 % 50,o% 40, 0% 30,0 % 20, 0% 10, 0% 0, 0% -10, 0% . Cons 1 Libs Cons ^ Libs 1 Cons. . Libs X Consv| Libs 1 Cons Libs - Upper Confidence Interval 18.0% j 5.5% 18.0% 5.5% 70.5% 46.2% 5.8% 36.1% 32.9% 42.5% Percentage 3.8% 2.3% 9.8% 2.3%jS8.9% 36.0% 2.0% 26. 21.6% 32.6% Lower Confidence Interval j 1.6% ) -0.9% I 1.6% I -0.9% 143.3%! 25.9% 1 -1.8% 117.4% 110.3% 122.7%

•— z S s o op •3 CO 3 3 5 «« H1^ P O •—' < Figure 7. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of Them. 78

The Liberals and Conservatives use immigrants as the antecedent for the third person pronouns in almost equal numbers: roughly 50% of the time for their and approximately 30% of the time for they, and with them, there is no significant difference in the number of times the pronoun is used to refer to immigrants - Conservatives, 57% vs. Liberals, 36%. However, after a careful examination of the individual makeup of the

'other' category, there are several instances of antecedents which could be considered specific "subgroups" of immigrants (e.g. family class members or college-educated immigrants). When those specialized categories are integrated into the immigrant category, the numbers become more alike: the Liberal usage of them to mean immigrants then becomes 44%, and the 'other' category falls to 25%.

Conservatives' and Liberals' Use of They 40.0% 35.0% 30.0% 25.0% 20.0% 15.0% 10.0% 5.0% 0.0% m Cons I Libs ICons Libs [Cons Libs i Cons [ LibsCon s Libs [ Cons I Libs j Cons| Libs [ ConsLibs| ! Upper CI 3.8% 12.8%36.2%31.6%21.2%4.0% 7.6% 0,0%23,8%33.7%3.8%|11.7%15.7%3.1%I20.1%27.4^ Percentage |l.9% 9.5% BO.O%26.6%16.2%!2.3% 4.8% 0.0%p.8.6%28.6%1.9%!8.6%111.4%1.6%!15.2%22.7% Lower Ci irj.1% 6.2%23.8%21.7%ii.2%0.6% 1.9? 0.0%[L3.3%23.5%0.1%!5.4%!7.1%i0.2%!l0.4%18.0%

53 9i VIJB , Si a > Ot l tad i •SP •B £ G ?• r- CZ i/i "roj Crt cc ~i J 3<, •3 g o ar- * i_ <* --. m Co i .ib e Figure 8. Conservatives' and Liberals' use of They. 79

Finally, two categories stood out in the use of they: the proposed amendments themselves, and Canadian employers or businesses. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Liberals discussed the former more often (9% vs. 2% for the Conservatives) and the Conservatives used the pro-form for the latter more often (11% vs. 2% for the Liberals). The amendments to the Immigration Act were the main topic under discussion - their influence on Canadian businesses, however, was more likely to be taken up by the

Conservatives.

The Liberal MPs' tendency toward the use of a generic 'we' to mean themselves as Canadians (inclusive of immigrants) or as parliamentarians, and only rarely as members of their political party, mirrors the results obtained by Inigo-Mora (2004). In her study of the British parliament, Inigo-Mora found that when the opposition party asked questions of the governing party, generic 'we' (meaning 'we, Britons') was used

53% of the time, followed by parliamentary 'we' 36.8% of the time, followed by exclusive 'we' (referring to one's own political party) 7.7% of the time (Inigo-Mora,

2004).

The results for the governing party's use of third person plural pronouns of Inigo-

Mora's (2004) investigation are also similar to those uncovered here. Governing party members in the British parliament overwhelmingly employed the use of exclusive 'we': they use it 76.1% of the time to "keep a distance between the speaker and the hearer"

(Inigo-Mora, 2004, p. 45). The Canadian Conservatives' use of we/our/us also heavily favours their identification as Conservatives. Coupled with their use of they to mean the opposition parties, the Tories are also engaged in keeping themselves apart from the other parliamentarians. 80

In summary, the discursive construction of immigrants is not being taken up here by the individual parties, except in the case of the Liberals inclusive use of Canadians for the our/us/we pro-forms. The Conservatives appear to be most concerned with establishing themselves as separate and distinct from the other parties in the House through their use of both first and third person pronouns. What these trends mean for

Canadian parliamentary discourse and national identity construction is addressed in the next section. 81

Chapter Six: Discussion

In order to frame the discussion of the analysis in the previous chapter, I return to my research questions: In what ways are immigrants linguistically and rhetorically defined in Canadian parliamentary discourse? How do those definitions change depending on the political affiliation of the speaker? How do the two main political parties use 'the immigrant' to negotiate power? The first two questions are addressed together, as the rhetorical and linguistic definitions of immigrants uncovered in the analysis section are dependent on the political party. First, however, I would like to address the issue of the other parties' MPs and their contributions to the Bill C-50 debate.

There were extensive comments by members of the New Democratic Party of

Canada (NDP), the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) and the two independent MPs sitting in the

House in the spring of 2008. Commentary on the immigration issue was offered by members of these parties, not only related to this passing of Bill C-50 (2008), but also to the role of immigrants and immigration policy in Canadian society. However, as the

Conservative MP Ed Komarnicki, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, stated, "NDP members vote consistently against everything because they know it will not make a difference... the NDP members know that they will not form government and they vote against everything" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons,

2008b, time code 1600). While I do not share this attitude toward the role that minority opposition parties play in a democratically elected parliament (especially as this tactic is often a way to distract attention from legitimate criticisms of government policy and/or political posturing), the honourable member who made the comment highlighted a distinction relevant to the principles of this CDA-based study. 82

Because the federal NDP, BQ (a regional party representing only Quebec that cannot, by virtue of sheer numbers, ever form a government) and any independent members are not true power elites (van Dijk, 1993) as it relates to Canadian federal politics, their involvement in the immigration debate during the budget bill passage, from a CDA perspective, is limited. The focus of CDA studies is on those "power elites that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality or injustice" (van Dijk,

1993, p. 252) and the members of national political parties that have not ever (and will not, in the foreseeable future) form a government have therefore had their comments excised from this study. The power to control Canadian immigration policy has rested with either the Conservatives or the Liberals for nearly all of Canada's history, and the language used within any debate centred on such should therefore focus (not necessarily exclusively) on their MPs' language.

Immigrants are linguistically and rhetorically defined in the debate over Bill C-50

(2008) depending on the speaker's party affiliation. Liberals, through the use of personal stories and inclusive we, ally themselves very closely with immigrants, incorporating their party's history into the narrative construction of immigrants (and vice-versa). The

Tories, however, do not incorporate any elements of the immigrant narrative into their political rhetoric - the absence of which suggests a desire on the Conservatives' part to remain discursively neutral or disengaged from immigrants. The Conservatives suggest an apparently neutral position on immigrants through the use of appeals to (external) authority regarding their own policies and integrating an 'us vs. them' construction when referring to the other political parties. Overall, how the two most powerful parties in

Canada position themselves in regards to immigrants reveals much about the nature of 83

Canadian parliamentary politics, in addition to how the parties view themselves and immigrants.

The Liberal corpus, at 49,179 words, is more than twice that of the Conservative corpus. The individual members talk about more than their experiences as immigrants and Canada's shameful history of racist immigration policies: they speak of the economic benefits of immigration, of their individual ridings' immigrant population, of the

Conservatives' "shutting/closing/slamming the door on" or "cherry-picking" (21 times and seventeen times, respectively) immigrants. They also accuse the other parties of playing politics with this issue. Their main rhetorical tactic is to identify themselves with immigrants through stories and the use of pronouns.

The corpus of Liberal speeches in the House begins with the then-leader of the

Liberal party, Stephane Dion, saying "Canada is a country that proudly welcomes people from all around the world" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008a, time code

1420). The Liberals, as the political party not currently in power, goes on to align itself with a group that traditionally has not held much power — immigrants. The power of that group is increasing, however: with a low birthrate and an aging population (Reitz, 2004),

Canada needs to encourage population growth, and the members of parliament recognize that encouraging immigration is an effective way to do so. One possible motivation - above and beyond building a voter base - that the Liberals may have for consciously, narratively constructing themselves as 'in' with the apparent 'out' group, is that they are redefining (rhetorically) who holds and can wield power, in order to match the real-world shift in Canadian demography. 84

The Liberal MPs' stories of immigrant experiences, both recent and ancestral, dovetails with their use of we, which "can be very well used in the service of 'linguistic imperialism' to verbally annex and usurp" (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999, p. 45). The 'in' group that the Liberals construct is an idealized version of Canada, where immigrants and their descendents - as previously noted, there is no place for First

Nations people in this discourse - are all equal and live in harmony. Honig (2001) suggests that this kind of xenophilia in America is "seen to be periodically reinvigorated by that country's newest comers, its idealized citizens: naturalizing immigrants. Again and again, the cure for corruption, withdrawal, and alienation is... aliens" (p. 4). The language used in the debate by Liberals suggests a need to be intimately connected with that narrative.

In contrast to the Liberals' active narrative participation in the immigrant experience lies the Conservatives' distancing. Mackey (1999) suggests that "one of the most important features of Western cultural power is that it is unmarked as culturally specific... [and] constructs its dominance through culturally unmarked and supposedly universal notions of rationality, progress and equality" (p. 166). By not incorporating themselves into the discursive construction of 'the immigrant,' the Conservatives are making a choice to appeal to reason, rather than emotion, and to maintain the cultural power (along with the actual political power) they have established.

In the Bill C-50 (2008) debate, the Conservatives are on the defensive, but do not go into extensive explanations as to the merits of their proposed amendment, choosing instead to quote the editorials as proof of their good governance. Conservative MPs make an effort not to engage in talk that might be perceived as 'ideological' or 'rhetorical.' 85

Their approach is pragmatic, with an emphasis on what they do/will do as the governing power, and what the other parties do/have done. Many of the they/them/their statements are simply a way for the Tories to reinforce their position with regard to the opposition parties. How they defend the immigration policy changes included in Bill C-50 is a reflection of the rhetorical strategy of justification.

The assumption outlined by Blommaert and Verschueren (1998), that homogenous societies are a natural, default state, may be part of the Conservatives' beliefs. The government's proposed changes are essentially a legislative manifestation of the "integration assumption" that Li (2003) examines: changing the Immigration Act to give the minister more direct power to choose who comes to Canada allows for potential integration to be a predetermined characteristic (for the most part, economic). Successful and rapid integration makes for a harmonious society, in both the Conservative and

Liberal rhetoric. How this well-blended society is to come about, and how the

Conservatives and Liberals fit into it - this is where the parties differ.

Because the out-of-power political party (Liberal) aligns itself closely with a

(historically) socially powerless group, and the party in power (Conservatives) tries to separate itself from rhetoric by appearing to be neutral, apolitical, and authoritative, the resulting discourse emphasizes and reinforces the power imbalance between the two.

Furthermore, the Conservative tendency toward positioning themselves as strongly anti-

Liberal could be read as anti-immigrant. If all language is social and reveals the social cognitions of the speaker, then the results here serve to outline the Liberal and

Conservatives' beliefs about how to wield power - either intimately, through an empathetic relationship or through an arm's length, impersonal one. 86

These two approaches to governing should not come as a surprise, according to

Lakoff (1996). Based on an analysis of the American political system and the commonsense assumptions made by both Republican (right-wing) and Democratic (left- wing) arguments through their use of metaphoric language in particular, his investigation outlines the cognitive processes behind modern American political thought:

Deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are different models of the

family. Conservatism... is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is

centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give

rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different

choices of words and different modes of reasoning, (p. 12)

Some of the metaphorically-defined priorities of the Strict Father (Conservative) model include: "A Community is a Family... Moral Authority is Parental Authority... Moral

Behaviour by Someone in Authority is Setting Standards and Enforcing Them" (p.77).

The Nurturant Parent model (Liberal) has some similarities and some differences: "The

Community is a Family... Moral Agents are Nurturing Parents... Moral Action is the

Nurturance of Social Ties" (p. 117-120). The Conservative and Liberal views on immigration, and the manner in which those views are expressed, come as no surprise in light of these models.

The Conservatives position themselves as the best decision-makers for immigrants and immigration issues because they are the Strict Fathers, seemingly

'outside' or 'above' the issue; the Liberals, on the other hand, try to convey the exact opposite. They stress that their personal experiences as immigrants and the historical precedent of their party as a Nurturant Parent regarding immigration makes for the best 87 governance on this, of all, issues. Ultimately, both parties play into an 'appeal to authority' - one based on third party authority and the other based on the authority gained from personal, lived experience. 88

Chapter Seven: Conclusions and proposals for further study

The investigation into the debate over Bill C-50 reveals how the Conservatives and Liberals discursively construct both immigrants and themselves. The Conservatives rely on external sources of approval for the decisions they make regarding immigrants - a tactic they reinforce with their use of pronouns in Parliament, which conveys a distinct

'us vs. them' attitude toward the other parties. The Liberals, on the other hand, construct themselves as immigrants, both through stories overtly identifying themselves as such and through the inclusive use of pronouns. Choosing to incorporate immigrants - or not - into the debate over immigration policy changes is a revealing tactic.

To the MPs in Canada's two main political parties, 'immigrant' is a discursive construct that may or may not involve the individual party member's indentifying as such. Overall, the Liberals are most often concerned with what Canada is, and how immigrants (including themselves) fit into this model of the world. Conservatives are more likely to discuss what Conservatives (or Liberals, or NDPers, etc.) do; consequently, there is no real place for 'the immigrant' in their discourse. The MPs of both parties reveal their underlying assumptions about power and how to wield it: the

Conservatives subscribe to a Strict Father model of governing; the Liberals favour the

Nurturant Parent ideal.

This investigation sheds light on the power negotiation tactics of the two strongest political parties in Canada. In better understanding these tactics, voters, and critics - both in the media and in academia - can be better armed for dismantling the arguments the parties make while courting votes or justifying policies. In addition to uncovering individual parties' tactics with regards to immigration, it would also be useful to 89 determine the topoi (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart, 1999) understood and employed by all Parliamentarians, as these can shed light on the underlying social cognitions of Canadians as a whole.

By considering the history of immigration to Canada, and reviewing the election platforms of the parties and transcripts of this debate, it is clear that immigrants - and

'immigration goals' - are primarily characterized in economic terms by both parties. That everyone accepts as a given that economic reasons are paramount in determining the best immigrant profile is something that bears closer examination, as a naturalized, commonsense assumption (Fairclough, 1995) that crosses political ideologies and sheds light not only on the greater society's ideals, but also on the political power structure controlling the immigrant population to service the country's economic needs. As

Ricento (2003) outlined in his CDA study of Americanizers, there is a liberal discourse strand that encourages the view that "America benefits from the foreign born" (Ricento,

2003, p. 630); in Canada, this discourse strand seems to be reflected very strongly in the discussion of what immigrants can do for the Canadian economy (Li, 2003). Discovering how this is expressed across discourses (e.g. media, academic, political) is a natural extension of this investigation.

Research has already been conducted on the discursive constructions of immigrants from media coverage (as in Baker et al., 2008; Santa Ana, 2002; Vukov, 2003), official documents (as in Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998; Mackey, 1999), and in letters to the editor in national and local newspapers (as in Sotillo & Starace-Nastasi 1999). A comprehensive study covering multiple discourses and based in both critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics approaches has not been attempted, however. CDA 90 provides a thorough framework for identifying distinct ideas and narratives about national identity in the media (De Cillia, Reisigl & Wodak, 1999), and the CL methods employed by Baker et al. (2008) are useful for dealing with even very large corpora.

Future study should consider determining the social cognitions of the power elites in

Canada across discourses and through a plurality of methods.

Adding in the contributions from the NDP/BQ/Independent members of the house would enrich the results of such a study greatly. How the political outsiders construct themselves in regards to immigrants could be revealing, especially as individual MPs do wield considerable power in their own ridings, even if they are not part of the majority party in the House. A more complete and specific set of rhetorical strategies, based on

Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart (1999), but particular to the Canadian socio political environment parliamentary tradition could be one way to develop the results of this expanded data set.

The rhetorical strategies outlined by Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Leibhart (1999) and used to classify the language of the Liberals and Conservatives in this investigation of the

Bill C-50 debate are based on a socio-political environment very different from Canada's.

Austria is a European nation with a common language and culture (historically), while

Canada has had an official policy of multiculturalism since the early 1970s. Austria has political parties which openly espouse xenophobic policies centring on the idea of "a community of one people and one culture (Volks- und Kulturgemeinschaft)... [which is] based on 'biological' and racist premises" (Bailer-Galanda & Neugebauer, 1996, para. \).

The xenophobic quote from the Reform Party's 1988 platform (authored by Prime

Minister Stephen Harper) which was read into the Hansard by Liberal MPs Stephane 91

Dion, Judy Sgro, and Gurbax Malhi is shocking for a Canadian audience, but not an

Austrian one: the platform said that immigration should not "radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada" (Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, 2008c, time code 1015).

While the rhetorical strategies employed by Canadian MPs are similar to those of the

Austrians, this debate and other Canadian parliamentary debates should be investigated further for differences - new rhetorical categories and strategies for the Canadian environment should be developed.

Overall, rhetorical strategies and the linguistic realizations of such should be considered. Pronouns are just one of those linguistic realizations; other possible sources of linguistic investigation include:

• word choices - the parties' preferences for particular terms for immigrants (e.g.

new Canadians, newcomers, skilled workers, etc.) could offer further insight into

how closely the parties' align themselves with immigrants

• verb usage - the use of performatives, the role of passives, and tense/aspect

considerations reveal much about the speaker's relationship to political power

• collocates - overlap in the use of terms (such as above) can reveal the

(mis)understandings of those terms (as in Baker et al., 2008)

• metaphors - CANADA AS A HOUSE is a common metaphor throughout (e.g.

"shutting the door on immigrants"); what other metaphors are evident?

In addition to the modern context on immigration, the historical one should be investigated more thoroughly than I have done here. The public debate centering on

Canada's multicultural paradigm has been a long and contentious one (Bissoondath, 92

1994; Mackey, 1999). Establishing the multicultural framework for Canadian government and society has not been "an easy road... but an ongoing balancing act and the product of intense negotiations, hard work, and strategy building" (Ricento &

Cervatiuc, 2010, p. 29). Reflecting the national and regional media's focus on the issue of

Canadian national identity, key word searches in newspaper articles and/or Hansard would be very revealing, especially exploring the months before and after the following events:

• the passage of the Multiculturalism Act of 1971

• the passage of the Canadian Multicultural Act in 1988

• the rejection of the Canadian referendum on the Charlottetown Accord in

1992

• the rejection of the Quebec referendum on sovereignty in 1995

An historical review would better establish the discourse strands that have been established for immigrants, and re-occur and are modified, concerning their place/role in

Canadian society.

Overall, this study of the debate over the amendments to the Immigration and

Refugee Protection Act in the spring sitting of Parliament in 2008 reveals the way power is negotiated in Canadian politics. Conservatives and Liberals omit or include immigrants from their discourse in an effort to establish themselves as a neutral, paternalistic presence or an understanding, fraternal one. Further investigations should consider the contributions of the other parties, other discourses, and complex historical forces that shaped the current context. 93

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