The goal of this thesis is to investigate language use among elite parliamentarians
in debates related to refugee asylum. It challenges the non-political “taken for granted”
notions that many parliamentarians employ in their speeches and, using Critical Discourse
Analysis, seeks to understand how argumentation, legitimation, and Othering strategies
are used to support and reinforce their positions. While the Conservative government
contends that Bill C-11: The Balanced Refugee Reform Act and Bill C-31: Protecting
Canada’s Immigration System Act are aimed at refugee reform and designed to target
“criminal middlemen,” I argue that their approach is actually aimed at restricting refugee
asylum, despite the fact that it is an internationally recognized treaty right. To augment
my efforts, I frame my analysis around the work of two key theorists: Antonio Gramsci
and Zygmunt Bauman.
The Gramscian model of cultural hegemony informs my thesis in at least two key
ways: first, I argue that language use (specifically, the negative portrayal of asylum
seekers) is manipulated for the sole purpose of presenting refugee claimants as criminals;
second, by criminalizing certain groups, the Conservative government is able to put
forward a particular worldview that portrays certain types of refugees as legitimate, and
therefore deserving of protection. I contend, however, that cultural hegemony is
insufficient to explain how the Conservatives are able to propagate this worldview given
that cultural hegemony is primarily driven by ideology. While contemporary Canadian
political ideologies differ significantly, opposition parties nonetheless unintentionally
reproduce a Conservative worldview regarding asylum seekers. In its place, I argue that banal hegemony helps to explain this discrepancy. Bauman’s discussion of mobility is
relevant given that I assess how asylum seekers are framed as illegals whose ability to
seek asylum is restrained. Restricting or controlling mobility is central to the
Conservative defense precisely because those who cannot arrive in Canada are unable to
make an asylum claim. In fact, over the past few years, there has been a movement to
“push the border out.”
I conclude that the Conservative defense is not only fallacious, untenable, and
prejudicial but designed to portray asylum seekers are criminals, fraudsters, and security
threats. This thesis adds to the extant literature on Critical Discourse Analysis from a
Canadian parliamentary perspective and describes how politics is constituted by, and
through, language. Moreover, it offers a sociological understanding of how parliamentary
debates help to produce and reproduce social inequality and prejudice