Managing dissent: Energy pipelines and “New Right” politics in Canada
It was a longtime dream to collaborate with my colleague, Bob Neubauer, on this project.
Bob and I had both been studying the Northern Gateway pipeline and discourses around energy policies in Canada from different aspects for a couple of years and realized that our approaches could be combined to form a Voltron analysis of what was happening.
I think about this project a lot in the years since completing it and would very much like to return to it as I think that it would be worth returning to to see how the discourses are changing in Canada with the addition of the TMX pipeline, the IPCC report, the Land Back movement, and the intensification of the pro-oil campaign.
In the meantime, here is a snapshot of the landscape in 2012.
Managing Dissent: Energy Pipelines and “New Right” Politics in Canada, Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 41 (2016) 115–133 2016.
Kathleen Raso & Robert Joseph Neubauer
Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT
This article explores the political controversy surrounding the proposed Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline by analyzing the modalities through which elite rationalities structure public news discourse. First, through a news analysis, the authors identify the most common pro-approval actors cited speaking in favour of the project. Next, they identify the most prominent pro-approval civil society sources and ascertain their level of embeddedness in conservative discourse coalitions. Finally, the authors identify the dominant framing techniques that disproportionately structure the public discourse around the Gateway project. The article ultimately argues that over-reliance on “official sources,” the prominence of industry-backed civil society organizations, and the influence of hegemonic discourses on journalistic practice all conspire to structure the public discourse on Northern Gateway in favour of elite preferences and rationalities.
Image credit: Chris Yakimov, from the People's Climate March 2014 - Vancouver