Syrian Refugees in Canada: A Security Issue? A Qualitative Content Analysis of the Conservative Party Rhetoric

Abstract

In August 2015, the Syrian crisis reached an all-time high in terms of number of refugees fleeing violence. The displaced sought asylum in numerous neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt (Slim and Trombetta, 2014). Eventually, some resettled in Canada. At the same time, Canada called for a federal election to be held in October 2015. The overlap of these two major events sets the political environment of this major research paper. As a wave of hatred against immigrants reaches all corners of the world, it is interesting to see if it also reached Canada. Following a deductive approach and testing securitization theory, the rhetoric of three main political actors from the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2015 election campaign will be analyzed. This paper argues that, according to the theory of securitization, the Conservative Party tried to link the concepts of refugees and security, but did not perform a securitization attempt per se.