Anti-bilingualism movement: the People's Alliance Party's Strategic Choices for Occupying Public Space


Joannie Jean, Université d'Ottawa; Michelle Landry, Université de Moncton

Language politics in Canada are more often analysed in a language policy or rights lens. This paper is part of a research program designed to advance our understanding of language issues from a social movement perspective. The aim is to shed light on the strategies of the anti-bilingualism movement to occupy public space and gain access to the polity. The analysis presented will focus on the Peoples Alliance political party in the year leading up to the 2018 elections. In some cases, such as this one, we can consider political parties as social movement organizations because they are formed to defend a cause, or the cause is assimilated to an existing party (Kriesi, 2014). The Peoples Alliance Party, founded in 2010 around the issue of a possible sale of NB Power to Hydro Québec, has readily embraced the cause of activists who want to redefine New Brunswicks language regime, gradually making the language question one of the partys main issues (Chouinard and Gordon, 2021). This third party elected three MLAs in the 2018 election and two in the 2020 election by focusing its election campaigns on issues that seek to limit the language rights of Francophones and the linguistic duality of certain public services (e.g. school buses, health networks). Social movement parties such as the Peoples Alliance dont exactly have the same conditions of access to the public space as social movements, which are largely subject to the mainstream medias treatment of social issues (Granjon, 2000). As a third party with elected MPs, journalists pay them a certain amount of attention in the treatment of the provinces political issues, but our analysis shows that the Peoples Alliance has strategically chosen to occupy the public arena in a different way. Indeed, by analyzing the Peoples Alliance occupation of media space, this study shows how this political party mainly uses social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and its official website, and alternative media such as Voice of the Province and The Dennis Report. This counterpart to the anti-bilingualism movement denounces and criticizes the dominant media (see Granjon, 2020), perceived by its leaders as ideological apparatuses for the domination of citizens.These strategic choices make it possible to further underpin its positioning and establish a grandstanding morale, as understood by Tosi and Warmke (2020).

Mouvement antibilinguisme : les choix stratégiques d'occupation de l'espace public du parti People's Alliance

This paper will be presented at the following session: