Conservatism and the Re-Communitarianization of Citizenship in Canada

Abstract

While the values and practices usually subsumed under the notion of “good citizenship” are said to have changed dramatically over the past 25 years or so, scholars are still struggling to characterize the concrete nature of these changes. Proposing a novel interdisciplinary approach that marries normative theory with empirically driven political sociology, in this paper we examine the explanations and justifications that flanked a plethora of new citizenship policies implemented under the former Stephen Harper-led Conservative government (2006–2015) in Canada. Critically employing Amitai Etzioni’s comparative typology of citizenship philosophies, we examine three types of Conservative policy discourses pertaining to citizenship, namely speeches given by the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, speeches given by members of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons, and government press releases. In contrast to Etzioni’s optimistic presentation of neo-communitarianism in political and philosophical terms, our study reveals that the exclusionary discourses and practices that accompany this approach in practice demand greater attention. In the case of the Harper Conservatives, we argue that their approach is best understood as a re-communitarianization of citizenship in neoliberal times that creatively, but only sparingly, invokes libertarian and liberal ideals in comparison to its use of what we identify to be (1) patriotic and (2) insecure communitarian discourses. Our findings point to both the exclusionary potentials and realities of neo-communitarian citizenship. They contribute to scholarship that argues the that the destruction of social ties, solidarity and “community” through neoliberal and neoconservative politics is often camouflaged and/or advanced by aggressive neo-communitarian discourses that harken back to or reinvent past ethnic or monocultural nationalisms, while only selectively including “deserving” Others at the margins.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Marie-Michèle Sauvageau for her important intellectual contributions to this research. Dr. Sauvageau was involved in the supervision of research assistants, the development of the coding grid, and in the analysis of the data. Ajida Mujkic provided invaluable assistance during the first coding phase. The authors are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their engaged comments, critiques, and suggestions—of which we could only take up a small portion. Finally, we are indebted to NEP and its editorial team!

Notes

1 Alex Marland, and Tom Flanagan, “Brand New Party: Political Branding and the Conservative Party of Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 46, no. 4 (2013): 951–72; Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012).

2 Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Daiva Stasiulis, “Ethnic Pluralism under Siege: Popular and Partisan Opposition to Multiculturalism,” Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de Politiques 18, no. 4 (1992): 365–86; John Carlaw, The Conservative Party of Canada and the Politics of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism (2006-2015), 2020, https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37387.

3 John Carlaw, “Unity in Diversity? Neoconservative Multiculturalism and the Conservative Party of Canada,” RCIS/CERC Working Paper Series 2021, no. 1 (2021): 39; Andrew Griffith, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism (OttawaL Anar Press, 2013); Jeffrey G. Reitz, “Pro-Immigration Canada: Social and Economic Roots of Popular Views,” IRPP Study 20, (2011). http://www.irpp.org/pubs/IRPPstudy/IRPP_Study_no20.pdf.

4 Naomi Alboim and Karen Cohl, Shaping the Future: Canada’s Rapidly Changing Immigration Policies, Maytree, 2012. http://maytree.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/shaping-the-future.pdf; Mathieu Forcier and Frédérick Guillaume Dufour, “Immigration, Neoconservatism and Neoliberalism: The New Canadian Citizenship Regime in the Light of European Trajectories,” Cogent Social Sciences 2, no. 1 (2016): 1199086–18.

5 Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Jean Chretien’s Immigration Legacy,” Review of Constitutional Studies 9, no. 1–2 (2004): 133–50; Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Building a New Citizenship Regime? Immigration and Multiculturalism in Canada,” in Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, edited by Jatinder Mann (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 263–83; Sedef Arat-Koç, “Neo-Liberalism, State Restructuring and Immigration: Changes in Canadian Policies in the 1990s,” Journal of Canadian Studies 34, no. 2 (1999): 31–56.

6 Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

7 Stuart Hall, “Gramsci and Us,” Marxism Today 31, no. 6 (1987): 16–21.

8 Idil Atak, Graham Hudson, and Delphine Nakache, “Making Canada’s Refugee System Faster and Fairer”: Reviewing the Stated Goals and Unintended Consequences of the 2012 Reform (CARFMS Working Paper Series, 2017/3, 2017). http://carfms.org/working-paper-published-in-the-series-by-idil-atak-graham-hudson-and-delphine-nakache/; Susan Barras and John Shields, “Immigration in an Age of Austerity: Morality, the Welfare State, and the Shaping of the Ideal Immigrant,” in Austerity: The Lived Experience, edited by Bryan Evans and Stephen McBride (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 195–221; Bronwyn Bragg and Lloyd L. Wong, ““Cancelled Dreams”: Family Reunification and Shifting Canadian Immigration Policy,” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 14, no. 1 (2016): 46–65.

9 John Carlaw, “Blunt Talk or Faux Outrage? The Politics of Expanding Migrant Worker Programs under Canada’s Former Conservative Government (2006–2015),” Studies in Political Economy 102, no. 3 (2021): 331–53; Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt, “The Impact of Precarious Legal Status on Immigrants’ Economic Outcomes,” IRPP Study 35, (2012): 43.

10 Audrey Macklin, “From Settler Society to Warrior Nation and Back Again: Canadian Citizenship in Transition,” in Citizenship in Transnational Perspective, Politics of Citizenship and Migration, edited by Jatinder Mann (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2017), 285–314.

11 Raymond Blake, “A New Canadian Dynamism? From Multiculturalism and Diversity to History and Core Values,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 26, no. 1 (2013): 79–103; Raymond Blake, “Citizenship, National Identity, and the Search for Stability in Canada,” Auc Studia TERRITORIALIA 19, no. 2 (2020): 11–38; Adam Chapnick, “A “Conservative” National Story? The Evolution of Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Discover Canada,” American Review of Canadian Studies 41, no. 1 (2011): 20–36.

12 John Carlaw, “A Party for New Canadians? The Rhetoric and Reality of Neoconservative Citizenship and Immigration Policy,” in The Harper Record 2008-2015, edited by Teresa Healy and Stewart Trew (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2015), 105–25; Megan Gaucher, “Attack of the Marriage Fraudsters!: An Examination of the Harper Government’s Antimarriage Fraud Campaign,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 50, no. 50 (2014): 187–206; Megan Gaucher, “Keeping Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer: Affective Constructions of “Good” and “Bad” Immigrants in Canadian Conservative Discourse,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 52, no. 2 (2020): 79–98; Erin Tolley, “Political Players or Partisan Pawns? Immigrants, Minorities, and Conservatives in Canada,” in The Blueprint: Conservative Parties and Their Impact on Canadian politics, edited by Jon Lewis and Joanna Marie Everitt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 101–28.

13 Esyllt Wynne Jones and Adele Perry eds., People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada. (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishers, 2011); McKay and Swift, Warrior Nation.

14 Karl Flecker, “Conservative Colours: The Harper Conservatives and the Colour-Coding of Canada,” in The Harper Record, edited by Teresa Healy (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2008), 167–85; Lois Harder, and Lyubov Zhyznomirska, “Claims of Belonging: Recent Tales of Trouble in Canadian Citizenship,” Ethnicities 12, no. 3 (2012): 293–316; Elke Winter, “(Im)Possible Citizens: Canada’s ‘Citizenship Bonanza’ and Its Boundaries,” Citizenship Studies 18, no. 1 (2014): 46–62.

15 Magdalena Fiřtová, “Framing Canadian Immigration Discourse under the Conservative Government (2006–2015): Breaking Path Dependence?,” Journal of International Migration and Integration 22, no. 1 (2021): 265–87.

16 Fiřtová, “Framing Canadian Immigration Discourse under the Conservative Government (2006–2015),” 278, 282.

17 John Carlaw, “Authoritarian Populism and Canada’s Conservative Decade (2006–2015) in Citizenship and Immigration: The Politics and Practices of Kenneyism and Neo-Conservative Multiculturalism,” Journal of Canadian Studies 51, no. 3 (2018): 782–816; Gaucher, “Keeping Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer”; Laura J. Kwak, ““New Canadians Are New Conservatives”: Race, Incorporation and Achieving Electoral Success in Multicultural Canada,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 10 (2019): 1708–26; David Laycock and Steven Weldon, “Right-Wing Populism, Conservative Governance, and Multiculturalism in Canada,” in Political Ideology in Parties, Policy, and Civil Society—Interdisciplinary Insights, edited by D. Laycock (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020), 61–90; Inder Marwah, Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, and Stephen White, “Immigration, Citizenship, and Canada’s New Conservative Party,” in Conservatism in Canada, edited by James Farney and David Rayside (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 95–119.

18 Sara Wallace Goodman, “Controlling Immigration through Language and Country Knowledge Requirements,” West European Politics 34, no. 2 (2011): 235–55; Christian Joppke, “Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe,” West European Politics 30, no. 1 (2007): 1–22.

19 Amitai Etzioni, “Citizenship Tests: A Comparative, Communitarian Perspective,” The Political Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2007): 353–63.

20 Ibid., 359.

21 Ibid.

22 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 270.

23 Stephen Castles, “How Nation‐States Respond to Immigration and Ethnic Diversity,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 21, no. 3 (1995): 293–308.

24 Etzioni, “Citizenship Tests,” 358.

25 Ibid., 359.

26 Ibid.

27 Amitai Etzioni, “Communitarianism,” in Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World (Volume 1), edited by Karen Christensen and David Levinson (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003), 224–8.

28 Etzioni, “Citizenship Tests,” 359–360.

29 Christian Joppke, “Through the European Looking Glass: Citizenship Tests in the USA, Australia and Canada,” Citizenship Studies 17, no. 1 (2013): 1–15.

30 17 April 2009 corresponds to the launch of the new citizenship guide. On 28 June 2013 parliamentarians last addressed the issue of Bill C-425, before the end of the 1st Session of the 41st Parliament. While Bill C-425 was not passed, many of its provisions were included in the Canadian Citizenship Act passed in 2014. While we agree that the Harper government’s “work” of communitarianism/citizenship went far beyond citizenship policy (including and impacting immigration, refugee admission, and multiculturalism), as one of the reviewers has put it, limitations in time and resources made it necessary to concentrate the analysis in this paper on citizenship policy alone. Expanding the scope would be a fascinating task for future research.

31 Macklin, “From Settler Society” in Citizenship in Transnational Perspective.

32 In a first round of data collection, we conducted a keyword search (“citizenship”) to identify speeches, press releases and relevant statements in the House of Commons and in the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration in 2009–2013. This search yielded 157 documents, which were then reduced (in several rounds of reading and debate among team members) to documents pertaining to the two citizenship policy initiatives.

33 Dissent among coders tended to emerge around questions whether a reference to culture conveyed a communitarian (collective, value-infused) or liberal (rights-based) meaning of citizenship. Differences in coding could not be resolved by associating particular words, phrases to one approach and not any other, but required debate and ultimately a shared agreement by all team members on the conveyed meaning. In this, qualitative content coding differs from quantitative coding (based on certain key terms).

34 The category of insecure communitarianism has some affinities with what Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Boca Raton, FL: Routledge, 2000) identified as “worried” nationalism: fears about the decline of the White Anglo-Saxon nation.

35 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Evidence—CIMM (40-3)—No. 36—House of Commons of Canada. 6 December 2010. https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/40-3/CIMM/meeting-36/evidence.

36 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Evidence—CIMM (41-1)—No. 73—House of Commons of Canada. 21 March 2013. https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/41-1/CIMM/meeting-73/evidence.

37 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, News Release—New Citizens Inducted into the Canadian Family at the Hockey Hall of Fame. Government of Canada, 28 December 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20121228014821/; http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2012/2012-10-19.asp

38 Elke Winter and Marie-Michéle Sauvageau, “Vers Une Compréhension Nationaliste de la Naturalisation au Canada? Analyse Des Changements Récents en Matière D’octroi de la Citoyenneté Dans le Contexte Canadien,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société 30, no. 01 (2015): 73–90.

39 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Evidence—CIMM (40-3)—No. 36.

40 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, News Release—Updated Discover Canada citizenship study guide now available. Government of Canada, 14 March 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20110317013635/; http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2011/2011-03-14a.asp.

41 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, News Release — Canadian citizenship not for sale: Minister Kenney provides update on residence fraud investigations. Government of Canada, 13 September 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120913042953/; http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2012/2012-09-10.asp

42 Jason Kenney, “On the Value of Canadian Citizenship,” Speaking notes for The Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. Government of Canada, 12 December 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20130516045531/; http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/speeches/2011/2011-12-12.asp

43 Carlaw, The Conservative Party of Canada.

44 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Evidence—CIMM (41-1)—No. 76—House of Commons of Canada. 18 April 2013. https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/41-1/CIMM/meeting-76/evidence.

45 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Evidence—CIMM (41-1)—No. 73.

46 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, News Release – New rules aim to strengthen the value of Canadian Citizenship. Government of Canada, 10 June 2010. https://web.archive.org/web/20130516043845/http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2010/2010-06-10.asp

47 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Evidence—CIMM (40-2)—No. 37—House of Commons of Canada. 1 December 2009. https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/40-2/CIMM/meeting-37/evidence

48 Jason Kenney, Speaking Notes for The Hon. Jason Kenney, PC MP Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism at the launch of the new Citizenship Study Guide, Discover Canada. Government of Canada. 16 May 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130516045736/; http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/speeches/2009/2009-11-12a.asp.

49 Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, Evidence—CIMM (41-1)—No. 73.

50 We contemplated subdividing the neo-communitarian category but decided against it. The excerpts from the selected government discourse do reflect the ideas proposed in Etzoni’s preferred category. It should also be noted that this large number is partly explained by the type of data analyzed: government and political discourse. Political and especially partisan rhetoric being what it is, we have noticed a rather strong tendency in all documents to repeat the same arguments repeatedly, which explains in part the quantitative importance of this category. Rather than undermining our findings, however, the intentionality that this implies reinforces our results.

51 Kelley Gordon, “Mobilizing Victimhood: Situating the Victim in Canadian Conservatism,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 54, no. 1 (2021): 41–59, 52.

52 Laycock and Weldon, “Right-Wing Populism.”

53 Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan, “The Racial Contract: Israel/Palestine and Canada,” Social Identities 14, no. 5 (2008): 637–60; Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Winter, “(Im)Possible Citizens.”

54 Carlaw, “Unity in Diversity?,” 12.

55 Will Kymlicka, “The Precarious Resilience of Multiculturalism in Canada,” American Review of Canadian Studies 51, no. 1 (2021): 122–42.

56 Paul Kellogg, “The Defeat of Stephen Harper: A Case Study in Social Movement Electoralism,” Journal of Canadian Studies 52, no. 3 (2018): 591–623.

57 Alexandra Dobrowolsky, “Bad versus Big Canada: State Imaginaries of Immigration and Citizenship,” Studies in Political Economy 98, no. 2 (2017): 197–222.

58 Elke Winter, “Passing the Test? From Immigrant to Citizen in a Multicultural Country,” Social Inclusion 6, no. 3 (2018): 229–36.

59 Laycock and Weldon, “Right-Wing Populism.”

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Notes on contributors

John Carlaw

John Carlaw is a postdoctoral Research Fellow under the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration Program, Toronto Metropolitan University. Other recent works of his appear in Canadian Diversity, Studies in Political Economy, the Journal of Canadian Studies, and the TMCIS/CERC in Migration and Integration Working Paper Series.

Elke Winter

Elke Winter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa, research director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Citizenship and Minorities (CIRCEM) and, in 2019–20, theWilliam Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Professor Winter’s research is concerned with questions of migration, ethnic diversity, integration and citizenship.