Systemic Discrimination Persistence Within Progressive Environments: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mediated Political Discourse on the Feminist Passing of Justin Trudeau During the 2015 Election Campaign = Persistance de la discrimination systémique : une analyse critique des discours politiques médiatisés du passage de Justin Trudeau comme féministe lors de la campagne électorale fédérale de 2015

Abstract

The 2015 Canadian election campaign was seen as a decisive moment for women's rights in Canada. In the decade preceding the elections, the country had been led by Stephen Harper, of the Conservative Party of Canada. Massive cuts in funding for women's organizations had been disastrous for the advancement of gender equality, a prime example being the shutdown of 12 of the 16 regional offices of Status of Women Canada. Hope for support of women's rights came with the Liberal Party Leader, Justin Trudeau, declaring himself as a staunch feminist. Now, almost a decade later, progress has been slow on many fronts; a breadth of reports, analysis and commentaries have come to question or attack Trudeau on his feminist claims. How is it possible that systemic discrimination has persisted under a government that ran a campaign based on inclusivity, equality, and fair representation? One way of answering this question is through understanding how the word feminism was utilized by the prime minister and interpreted by a sample of media actors during the 2015 federal election campaign. Understanding that knowledge is situated and constructed via communicative practices, such as discourse, this thesis examines what feminism has been made to mean by three different actors: Prime Minister Trudeau, through his public speeches; traditional English newspapers, through their commentary on Trudeau's 2015 campaign; and, by feminist activists and organizations that covered the campaign through online publications. The thesis takes on a feminist standpoint and intersectional approach to critical discourse analysis and mobilizes the concept of passing to analyze these three different corpora. NVivo was used to support the analysis in two of three articles, and Voyant was added as a tool for the third article, written in French. The thesis reveals that Trudeau supports a neoliberal feminist stance, one that undermines a large part of feminist endeavours as it only serves to support colonialist, capitalist, and patriarchal goals, three of the strongest systems of power that oppress women, especially women whose intersecting identities may make them vulnerable to different and accumulating forms of oppression.