Parents' Rights, Children's Rights? Ideological Differences in the English-Canadian Media Coverage over the SOGI Curriculum Disputes and Protests


Yi-Cheng Hsieh, McGill University

In the summer of 2023, the Higgs government in New Brunswick announced changes to Policy 713, asking parental consent before teachers use a child’s preferred pronoun; in September, the Moe government in Saskatchewan followed suit. Following these policy changes, the Parents Rights Coalition of Canada opposed the current Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) curriculum and orchestrated the 1 Million March 4 Children protests across provinces, with the goal of protecting children from what they saw as the premature indoctrination of sex/gender curriculum. In contrast, supporters of the SOGI curriculum staged counter-protests, advocating for the rights of transgender and gender diverse youth in schools and condemning misinformation dispersed maliciously. Meanwhile, the Saskatchewan court granted an injunction to pause the pronoun policy, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that the parents’ rights protests were ideas imported from the far right in the United States. This caused the Muslim Association of Canada to demand Trudeau to retract connections of hate and parents’ rights. As Trudeau implicitly indicated, the conflicts around the SOGI curriculum could be attributed as part of the “Culture War” thesis, that the ideological orientations and competing moral views amplify the right-left division. Among the processes of conflicts escalation, Canadian media outlets played a role in presenting, framing, and selecting facts, actions, and voices, shaping the contour and boundary of the Culture War on sex/gender diversity. This article explores how media outlets represent the SOGI curriculum dispute, aiming to estimate variations across provinces, ideological orientations, and coverage types. A second question examines whether expert-assessed scores of media ideology align with the topics media outlets select to cover. Based on expert-assessed scores, the Canadian Media System Survey categorizes media outlets to “liberal” as opposed to “conservative” in economic, social, and religious topics. However, the extent to which these subjective scores accurately represent the actual coverage of topics remains to be tested. I collect news data via the ProQuest platform (coverage in English), build a dataset with provincial and news type covariates, and incoporate ideological scores from the Canadian Media System Survey. I use natural language processing and textual analysis with standard preprocessing choices and employ structural topic model (STM) to incorporate covariates in estimating topics. Because the data on ideological scores are restricted, I run three different models (unrestricted, restricted without ideological scores, and the main model) and compare the results regarding the numbers and prevalence of topics. Results from unrestricted and restricted models are somewhat different; still, the restricted model is able to identify crucial topics about the protest confrontation and trans-youth’s narrative as distinct topics. The main model incorporates ideological scores in estimating topics, and results are more stable than the restricted model. I find that the ideological orientations are reflected in the topics selected by different media outlets, and these differences are shown in the news instead of the opinions pieces. The main model returns thirteen topics as optimal, with differences in provinces and ideological scopes of the media outlets. While both liberal and conservative outlets provide substantial coverage of protest confrontations, extremes on both sides also commented on the relation between Muslim communities and the SOGI curriculum. The liberal covers legislative and factual-check news, while the conservative justifies parents’ involvement in school curriculum. Notably, relatively neutral outlets cover more on trans youth’s narrative and their lives in school. Results also indicate that differences in news types are insignificant. When estimating topics on protest confrontations, Muslim connections, and trans-youth narrative, with ideological scores and news type jointly, the model suggests that it is news that demonstrates ideological difference. This article contributes to our knowledge of the media’s role in the Cultural War around gender/sexual diversity. It argues that the ideological preferences of media outlets manifest in the different topics covered within the same issue. Future research might use other social issues, such as labour strikes or immigration policies to further examine the correspondence between subjective and objective measurements of media ideology.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: