With the global proliferation of right-wing populist leaders and movements over the past decade, the political mobilization of victim arguments has received growing academic and journalistic attention. Despite a high degree of contestability over the discursive contours of populism itself (Mudde and Kaltwasser, Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2017), there is nearly unanimous agreement that populist leaders of all political stripes draw heavily on themes and discourses of victimization (Horwitz, Reference Horwitz2018). Indeed, a victim claim is found at the heart of populist rhetoric—one that positions the silenced “people” as victimized by an out-of-touch, unresponsive and corrupt elite.
Most studies examining the relationship between conservatism and the politics of victimhood tend to focus on victim arguments when they are mobilized in prototypically populist forms (Laycock, Reference Laycock1990; Horwitz, Reference Horwitz2018). Much of this literature suggests either that conservatism is defined by an anti-victimist ideology (Cole, Reference Cole2007; Campbell and Manning, Reference Campbell and Manning2018) or that, in the populist vein, the victim is embodied by the people—discursively constructed as victimized by an elitist political system and culture (Budd, Reference Budd, Stengel, MacDonald and Nabers2019; Laycock and Weldon, Reference Laycock, Weldon and Laycock2017).
This article asks whether this representation of the relationship between conservatism and victim arguments is correct by explicitly examining how conservative politicians mobilize victim arguments in Canada, focusing not only on contemporary populist arguments, but also on arguments that extend beyond expected populist forms. In particular, it asks two interrelated questions: What role does the victim occupy in Conservative Party politics and discourse in Canada? And what insights can victim arguments provide about the nature of conservative politics and ideology, more largely?
I answer these questions by comparing the parliamentary defence of two key pieces of legislation passed by Stephen Harper's Conservative majority government, both of which mobilized often contrasting victim arguments. The first, Bill C-10 (Safe Streets and Communities Act), implemented many of the Harper government's “tough on crime” initiatives, including controversial mandatory minimum sentencing legislation. The second, Bill C-36 (Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act), (re)criminalized sex workFootnote 1 following the Bedford Supreme Court decision. Both bills became keystone legislation of the Harper government, drew heavily on arguments about victims and victimization and addressed issue areas (crime and gendered violence) that remain noteworthy sites of investigation, given the ideological and discursive space they retain in the Conservative Party and larger Canadian society.
Comparing these bills, I argue that while all populist arguments may be a form of victim argument, not all conservative victim arguments are populist—particularly ones directed at issues related to women and gender equality. My findings suggest that, perhaps due to the reactive nature of conservative ideology, conservative politicians in Canada adopt an “ambidextrous” approach to victims—mobilizing two distinct, and at times contrasting, sets of arguments. Using their “right hand,” Members of Parliament (MPs) mobilize rather expected (but in some ways novel) representations of victims, appealing to penal populist sensibilities of toughness, crime and punishment. Using their “left hand,” however, MPs soften both the tone and contours of their victim arguments, often conjuring surprisingly bold, feminist, progressive and anti-racist-sounding refrains.
I elaborate this argument in four parts below. Sections 1 and 2 offer an overview of Canadian conservative politics and its relationship to victim arguments and discuss case selection and methodology. Section 3 presents my key finding: that victim arguments are central to Conservative Party discourse in Canada. This section unpacks the ambidexterity with which MPs deliver victim arguments, highlighting the ways these vacillate between rightist and leftist approaches to processes of victimization. Finally, section 4 asks: How can we explain this discursive ambidexterity? I conclude by proposing two possible accounts: one stemming from the literature on organizational management and the other from theorizations of the reactive nature of conservative ideology.
1. A Brief History of Conservative Victim Arguments in Canada
Few would question the salience of discourses of victimization in contemporary politics, for they have long played a central role in political theory and legal and public discourse. Historically, the term victim has roots in ancient Greek thought, as well as in early Christian conceptions of suffering, sacrifice and death (Lu, Reference Lu2017). The victim was even recognized in ancient civilizations, where law mandated the victim be recognized as a person who deserved “to be made whole again” by the offender (Dussich, Reference Dussich2006).
Discourses of victimization have not only shaped our legal and political approaches to justice and retribution, however; they also heavily influence the way we speak about politics and concretely frame political grievances (Jacoby, Reference Jacoby2015). First emerging from the contentious politics of the 1960s, an explicit politics of victimhood has been a central feature of political life ever since, with the victim operating as a historically and discursively mutable category, flexible enough to structure the demands of a broad swath of political grievances and demands (Cole, Reference Cole2007). Perhaps precisely because of this discursive malleability, the victim—and related debates over claims of victimization—has now, more than ever, taken on an iconic status in politics on both the right and left of the political spectrum.
On the right, conservatives in Canada have long invoked a variety of victims: children, Western and rural Canadians, veterans and taxpayers (to name just a few) (Sawer and Laycock, Reference Sawer and Laycock2009). However, with the global rise of populist leaders and rhetoric throughout the 2010s, populism is now the most oft-cited example of the immense potential and power of victim arguments on the right (Horwitz, Reference Horwitz2018). Appealing to an us-versus-them dichotomy, populist arguments contend that political power is concentrated in a small political elite that ignores the rights, voices and values of a silenced and victimized majority (Sawer and Laycock, Reference Sawer and Laycock2009). In one of the most striking examples of rightist victim arguments, this populist rhetorical structure—which took boldly ethnonational forms—helped propel Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016. Throughout his campaign and subsequent presidency, Trump invoked dramatic discourses of victimization, presenting both himself and the American people as victims of Democrats, immigrants, the “deep state” and “fake news,” among various other nefarious forces (Bruni, Reference Bruni2020).
While outbursts of ethnonational backlash populism have been more subdued in Canadian party politics (Besco and Tolley, Reference Besco, Tolley, Goodyear-Grant, Johnson, Kymlicka and Myles2018), populist victim arguments have nonetheless proven to be a considerable force in Canada as well, primarily emerging out of the Western prairie provinces and taking market-based shapes. In Sawer and Laycock's telling, market populist arguments in Canada deploy the “traditional semantic grammar of populism,” but rather than immigrants, it targets “so-called elites and special interests responsible for maintaining a large welfare state at the taxpayers’ expense” (Reference Sawer and Laycock2009: 134). Like all populist narratives, market-based forms of populism rest on a victim argument—presenting society as divided between elites and ordinary people, arguing that the latter is victimized by the former.
The arc of contemporary Canadian market populism is perhaps best traced through the rise of the Reform Party throughout the 1990s (Flanagan, Reference Flanagan2009), its eventual takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party (Lewis and Everitt, Reference Lewis and Everitt2017) and the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Snow and Moffitt, Reference Snow and Moffitt2012). From its founding in 1987, the Reform Party led by Preston Manning drew heavily on market populist themes—capitalizing on a growing sense of Western alienation and dissatisfaction with the status quo in federal politics that treated Ontario and Quebec as the economic and political centre of the country. Manning sought to organize the “common people” against a coalition of government and business elites and their management of the Canadian welfare state (Budd, Reference Budd, Stengel, MacDonald and Nabers2019). The Reform Party's brand of populism drew on a wide enough assortment of victim arguments to attract disparate segments of support, attracting Western regionalists, free marketers, direct democracy enthusiasts, opponents of a strong federal government, and social conservatives (Laycock and Weldon, Reference Laycock, Weldon and Laycock2017). Despite being the son of Alberta's longest-serving premier, Manning developed a folksy, Western-based brand of “anti-politics,” claiming a unique capacity to listen to the “common sense of the common people” (Patten, Reference Patten1999).
After the merger of the Progressive Conservative and Reform Parties (renamed the Canadian Alliance in 2000), market populism remained central to conservative party politics. Former Reformer Stephen Harper would secure the party leadership by promising “lower taxes for the many, not special subsidies for the few” (Sawer and Laycock, Reference Sawer and Laycock2009: 141). While campaigning, Harper promised to deliver voters “a country of freedom and rights for ordinary people, taxpayers, and families, not just for criminals, political elites and special interests” (141). Within this discourse, Liberal government corruption, taxation, wealth redistribution and government handouts are seen to be victimizing ordinary and middle-class citizens and families.
While there has been a great deal of recent academic and popular focus on right-wing populism, victim arguments are by no means the exclusive purview of rightist politics. Populist victim arguments can take leftist forms, as they did in the Canadian prairies where socialist agrarian populism took hold throughout the 1930s (Lipset, Reference Lipset1971). Contemporary progressive politics also has its own distinct history of discourses of victimization. In many ways, the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s—which drew on arguments about racial victimization that sought to highlight the violent reality of being Black in America—pioneered these discursive and activist strategies on the left (Horwitz, Reference Horwitz2018). Often buttressed by graphic imagery and personal testimonials of slavery and the Jim Crow era, stories of racial victimization connected personal experiences of discrimination to larger structures of systemic racism (Tyson, Reference Tyson1998; for discussion in Canada, see Cole, Reference Cole2020). These victim arguments also took intersectional forms, linking racial, gendered and classed systems of oppression and victimization (Combahee River Collective, Reference Smith1983). It comes as no surprise that the civil rights model of activism heavily influenced the structure and arguments of subsequent social movements the world over (Cole, Reference Cole2007, 15; Brown, Reference Brown1995).
Of course, creating a dichotomy of leftist and rightist victim arguments risks erasing the ways in which the politics of victimhood has become a site of live partisan and ideological struggle. As a consequence, the very contours of one side's victim arguments are shaped and swayed by the their opponents' rhetoric (see Cole [Reference Cole2007] for full discussion). For example, the mobilization of progressive victim arguments from the civil rights era and beyond has been met with anti-victimist opposition—particularly from conservatives. In response to claims of gender and racial victimization, many on the right of the political spectrum charge progressive politics with promoting a “victim mentality” and creating a “culture of victimization” (Campbell and Manning, Reference Campbell and Manning2014). Perhaps paradoxically, conservative politicians and social movement activists often adopt progressive and feminist-sounding victim arguments. As I have argued elsewhere, the contemporary anti-abortion movement in Canada has supplemented its traditional arguments about fetal personhood with ones about how abortion victimizes women, often mimicking feminist arguments about choice, coercion and the devaluation of motherhood (Saurette and Gordon, Reference Saurette and Gordon2013, Reference Saurette and Gordon2016). These examples highlight the blurriness that accompanies the political mobilization of victim arguments.
Nevertheless, the right/left dichotomy of victim arguments provides a useful typology for outlining major—and often fundamental—emotional, discursive and ideological differences that underpin progressive and conservative approaches to victims and victim arguments. One might even read the significant debates between them as emerging out of disagreements over which pairings of victim and oppressor are most important. Given that successful political persuasion depends on the ability to communicate an ideology or worldview in a way that registers on an emotional level with constituents (Westen, Reference Westen2008), it is not surprising that the victim has become a powerful, and yet intensely contested, symbol in contemporary politics.
2. Case Selection and Methodology
Given the relevance and salience of victim arguments, the lack of explicit attention devoted to the political mobilization of victim arguments in Canadian politics is somewhat surprising. Indeed, no previous study investigates directly how discourses of victimization function in contemporary Canadian party politics. The remainder of this article seeks to address this gap through an empirical examination of the parliamentary defences of Bills C-10 (Safe Streets and Communities Act) and C-36 (Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act), both tabled by the Harper majority government between 2011 and 2015.
These bills passed new laws that were controversial and heavily debated in the media and which came to represent significant issue areas for Stephen Harper during his tenure as prime minister. While both pieces of legislation dealt with topics related to crime and criminal justice—and thus share important policy and discursive similarities—they are also marked by fundamental differences. Given that Harper identified “crime and sentencing reform” as one of five policy priorities throughout the 2011 election campaign, Bill C-10 largely delivered on his promise to “get tough on crime” (Saurette and Gunster, Reference Saurette and Gunster2011). By contrast, Bill C-36 was reactive, with the largely unpredicted Bedford Supreme Court decision forcing a parliamentary response by striking down Canada's existing prostitution laws in 2013. As a result, the legality of sex work became an unexpected and yet significant issue area for the Conservative government throughout 2014—one year before a federal election. Against mounting pressure to decriminalize sex work, Harper opted instead to maintain the status quo, placing prostitution back in the criminal code with some modifications.
To analyze these two bills, I employed an intertextual mixed-method discourse analysis (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough1992), an approach inspired by the basic theoretical premise that the words we use in politics matter (Connolly, Reference Connolly1983; Wodak, Reference Wodak1989). The analysis involved three steps: (1) assembling a dataset of representative conservative discourse, which included every speech delivered in Parliament by Conservative MPs in defence of Bill C-10 and Bill C-36 (202 total speeches); (2) creating a coding dictionary (Miller, Reference Miller2004);Footnote 2 and (3) manually coding the dataset using the software QDA Miner. The advantage of this mixed-method approach—which requires close qualitative interpretation and coding of each speech, while retaining rigorous quantitative analysis—is that it allows researchers to gauge both how widely and intensively certain rhetorical strategies are employed across a given discourse.Footnote 3
3. Conservative Victim Argument in Canadian Parliament
My analysis of Bills C-10 and C-36 reveals that discourses of victimization are central to the articulations and defence of Conservative policy in Canada. Indeed, Conservative MPs used some iteration of the term victim a striking 398 times over 16 days of debate. Moreover, there are strong indications that the government's mobilization of victim arguments extended beyond their archetypal market populist application. These findings challenge many common assumptions made about the Conservative Party's relationship to victims and the ideological underpinning and contours of discourses of victimization.
3.1 The rise of penal populism in Canada: Bill C-10 and right-handed conservative victim arguments
Scholars have argued that the Harper government's Bill C-10 represents a significant departure from previous eras of crime policy in Canada (Webster and Doob, Reference Webster and Doob2015). In contrast to countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, Canada had relatively stable levels of incarceration since the late nineteenth century, in large part due to a cross-party consensus in favour of a moderate approach to crime and sentencing. As criminologists Cheryl Webster and Anthony Doob suggest, “The key distinguishing feature of the roughly 75 years prior to 2006 is the remarkable consistency in the value statements about Canada's broad orientation towards offenders and appropriate responses to them as expressed by the policy elite” (Reference Webster and Doob2015: 303).
With the election of a Conservative majority government in 2011, however, this century-old moderate approach to crime was sidelined. In its place emerged a more partisan, punitive and prison-centric approach advocating a tough on crime approach and harsher punishments. Much of the implementation of this approach came in the form of omnibus Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, which passed into law on March 12, 2012. The bill combined nine separate measures, all tabled in Parliament by Conservative minority governments prior to the 2011 federal election.
The first thing worth emphasizing about the parliamentary defence of Bill C-10 is the frequency with which discourses of victimization were mobilized. A dominant 68 per cent of speeches appealed to at least one victim argument, with some iteration of the word victim being uttered a total of 292 times through nine days of debate. As stressed by then-Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, “There are countless stories of Canadians who have been victimized by crime” (March 6, 2011: 10:25 am).Footnote 4
The victim was also foregrounded into the bill itself in other ways, most prominently with the introduction of victim impact statements (VIS) into Canadian judicial proceedings. VIS are written or oral accounts describing physical or emotional harm and effects of crime delivered by victims or their families during sentencing, with the intent of elevating the status of the victim throughout legal and sentencing proceedings. While critics worry that the emotional, gendered and racialized effects of VIS on judges and juries risk compromising the objectivity of the judiciary, supporters of the practice contend they give victims a voice in a criminal justice system where the rights of criminals are favoured (Bandes, Reference Bandes1996). The Harper Conservative government strongly embraced the latter tenet. In the words of MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay, “How can such a victim's statements not touch all our hearts? . . . These measures help to ensure . . . the need for offender accountability and giving voice to their victims” (December 2, 2011: 10:05 am). At the heart of Bill C-10 and its introduction of the VIS, then, rests an argument about victims: that “the interests of law-abiding citizens should be placed ahead of those of criminals” (Seeback, November 29, 2011: 3:50 pm).
The specifics of this victim argument share many similarities with other conservative populist victim frames—most importantly, portraying a world divided into camps of “us” and “them.” Unexpectedly, the market populist discourse that so often speaks for/to the neoliberal core of conservative politics in Canada was absent from Conservative Party discussions over Bill C-10 (Farney Reference Farney2019a); rather, stereotypically rightist arguments about fiscal restraint and taxpayer burden were more frequently mobilized by Liberal and New Democrat MPs, who contended that imposing mandatory minimum sentences would increase incarceration rates and contribute to a growing and increasingly costly prison system. Given that in 2011 (the year Bill C-10 was tabled) police-reported crime rates were at their lowest since 1972, opponents argued these reforms were unnecessary and would “do nothing more than burden the Canadian taxpayer” (Cohen, Reference Cohen2012).
Instead, with Bill C-10, common market populist logics were replaced by more punitive penal populist ones. Penal populism, which has emerged against the global backdrop of larger rightward populism, tends to be centred on a zero-sum theory of deterrence, promoting the notion that the tougher the punishment for a particular crime, the less likely the crime will occur (Roberts et al., Reference Roberts, Stalans, Indermaur and Hough2003). At the policy level, the central tool of penal populism is imprisonment, although it can also adopt other “law and order” measures such as mandatory sentencing, undermining judicial discretion, trying juveniles as adults and increasing maximum sentences (all of which were also key components of Bill C-10) (Roberts et al., Reference Roberts, Stalans, Indermaur and Hough2003). At the discursive level, penal populism tends to operate on the premise that crime victims and communities have been victimized and rendered voiceless by dangerous and overprivileged criminals. As in all forms of populist discourse, the victim is afforded a special rhetorical status.
Speeches made in defence of Bill C-10 fit the script of penal populism in two ways. First, as Paul Taggart's influential book Populism suggests, populist politics tend to emerge out of moments of crisis—real or perceived (Taggart, Reference Taggart2000). In this populist vein, Conservative MPs framed Bill C-10 as responding to a crisis in the criminal justice system and its inability to justly and efficiently advocate for victims. In 10.5 per cent of speeches, MPs argued that Canadians were increasingly concerned about the inadequacy of our criminal justice system; in another 6.5 per cent of speeches, crime in Canada was represented as rampant and criminals as unchecked. At the centre of these claims lay the notion that “there are countless stories of Canadians who have . . . los[t] confidence in our justice system” (Nicholson, March 6, 2012, 10:25). This crisis in confidence is met with a Conservative promise “to provide important new measures to meet unmet needs of victims” (Findlay, December 2, 2011, 10:05 am).
Second, like all populist discourse, the penal populist approach to Bill C-10 divided Canadian society into two disparate camps: “criminals” (us) and “victims” (them). Both of these camps tended to operate as imprecise categories. Consider the ambiguity around the most common “victim types” cited by MPs: Canadians (40% of speeches), children (30%) and victims of crime (15%). The most common “targets of attack” were criminals (40.5%), Liberals/NDP (30%) and sexual offenders (17%).
While the indeterminacy of rhetorical appeals might at first seem puzzling, they share much in common with other forms of populist rhetoric. Like populist appeals to “the people”—central to most, if not all, populist discourse—the nebulousness of the victim categories in the content of Bill C-10 holds the potential of simplifying political space through the symbolic division of society into two antagonistic groups. For instance, Mudde and Kaltwasser (Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2017) argue that “the people” in populist discourse must remain flexible enough to affectively appeal to a wide range of different constituencies, thereby generating a shared identity around which many can support a common cause. In the case of Bill C-10, “the people” were symbolically unified around the “victim.” Conservative speeches accomplished this through a series of “network associations” (Westen, Reference Westen2008). First and foremost, MPs spoke compassionately for victims, portrayed as innocent, suffering and voiceless. MPs insisted that “the rights of the victims are overlooked and forgotten” (Wilks, November 29, 2011: 4:05 pm) and that the government will protect “victims of crime who feel they are voiceless in the present system” (Findlay, December 2, 2011: 10:05). Extending this argument, MPs also positioned all “law-abiding Canadians” as at risk of becoming victims, insisting that “many do not like to think these things [violent crime] happen in Canada until it happens to them or their loved ones” (Nicholson, March 6, 2012: 10:25). For this reason, the government proclaimed that they “always ensure that the interests of victims and law-abiding Canadians are protected and that we are standing up for them and their rights” (Nicholson, March 6, 2012: 10:25).
By drawing on a network association between the victim and law-abiding Canadians, the two become metaphorically entangled. Consider that the term law-abiding Canadian was invoked in 19 separate speeches and in every instance appeared alongside a rhetorical victim appeal. In one representative example, Justice Minister Nicholson contends that “there are a lot of ordinary law-abiding Canadians and victims right across this country who are applauding [Bill C-10]” (March 6, 2012: 10:25). Associated together, victims and ordinary law-abiding Canadians function as a relatively cohesive discursive unit that comes to signify the populist people. Ultimately, we are unified as a people because we are all potential victims. Completing this penal populist rhetorical association was the oft-repeated claim that while the majority of ordinary Canadians supported Bill C-10, it was “only a small minority of people that oppose Bill C-10: criminals and the Liberal Party of Canada” (Jean, November 29, 2011: 3:20 pm).
Similarly, while Conservative MPs invoked the word criminal 57 times, the contours of each appeal were also surprisingly consistent. Parliamentary speeches are sprinkled with repeated promises to “stand against violent criminals and those who would sexually exploit children” and to “hold criminals accountable for their actions and to do everything we can to make our communities safe for law-abiding citizens who work hard and play by the rules” (Dykstra, September 27, 2011: 3:40 pm). Criminals were represented as the antithesis of law-abiding Canadians: while we “work hard and play by the rules,” they “take advantage of our generous” criminal justice system (Dykstra, September 27, 2011: 3:40 pm). As one MP succinctly argues, “Frankly, people who commit serious crimes should do serious time because they have taken away something from people. They have violated society as a whole” (Jean, November 29, 2011: 3:20 pm). This narrative presents criminals as different from us since they have violated the social contract by choosing a life of crime.
Taken as a whole, the penal populist defence of Bill C-10 can be characterized as a “right-handed” example of conservative victim arguments. This right-handed metaphor is useful in identifying at least two sensibilities of rightist victim arguments. First, right-handed arguments tend to rely on individualized notions of crime and punishment, bypassing larger discussions of the root causes of criminality and systemic considerations. In the case of Bill C-10, for example, there was no sustained debate over why certain groups tend to be victimized by certain types of crime at higher rates than others, nor any discussion of the root and systemic causes of criminality. Despite being statistically more likely to be the targets of certain violent crime, for example, MPs avoided discussion of victimization by women, BIPOC Canadians and/or LGBTQ minorities (Statistics Canada, 2017).
Second, the right-handed metaphor is helpful in highlighting the ways penal populist victim arguments frame the world: as a place where individuals need strict rules, rewards and punishments to cultivate the self-discipline, self-reliance and deep respect for legitimate authority that is required in a well-ordered society. Throughout parliamentary speeches, strong authority and harsh punishments were presented as morally sanctioned and instrumentally necessary in order to protect victims. Indeed, themes of toughness, accountability and strictness were the dominant metaphorical orientation of the vast number of speeches, with MPs insisting that the new crime bill will “hold criminals accountable” (Nicholson, November 29, 2011: 10:25), “support tougher measures” and meet the demands of the majority of Canadians who “would like our justice system to be more strict” (Goguen, March 6, 2011: 12:50 pm). It is worth noting that the rhyming catchphrase “those that commit crime are going to do serious time” reappeared in 13 separate speeches.
3.2 Protecting women and victims: Bill C-36 and left-handed conservative victim arguments
As opposed to Bill C-10, which was long part of Prime Minister Harper's tough on crime campaign and governance strategy, Bill C-36 came about after a series of largely unexpected court decisions invalidated Canada's existing prostitution laws. In 2013, the unanimous Supreme Court decision, Canada v. Bedford (2013), declared Canada's prostitution laws to be in violation of the security (and to a lesser extent, the liberty) of sex workers under section 7 of the Charter.
Penned by Justice Beverley McLachlin, the Bedford decision suspended the declaration of the existing prostitution laws’ invalidity, giving Parliament one year to draft a new law. Unlike previous prohibitions against prostitution, Bill C-36 adopted the “Nordic” approach—targeting the buyers of sex by criminalizing the purchasing (and not the selling or sellers) of sex. However, it also retained a number of “hybrid” provisions that criminally targeted sex workers, including a prohibition on “advertising the sale of sexual services” and a vague provision making it a crime for sex workers to be in areas where children are likely to be present. With this, the Conservative government placed prostitution back in Canada's Criminal Code with one major difference: the primary (although not sole) legislative target was clients, not sex workers.
As was the case with Bill C-10, the government's endorsement of Bill C-36 relied heavily on themes and discourses of victimization. Indeed, some iteration of the term victim appeared 91 times throughout speeches. Moreover, notable similarities between Bill C-10's and Bill C-36's mobilization of victim arguments emerged, with MPs arguing that sex work (like crime) poses a threat to Canadian communities and children. Significantly, over 30 per cent of speeches argued that Bill C-36 is needed to protect our “own beautiful and vulnerable children from predators” (Smith, September 22, 2014: 1:15 pm). MPs argued that “facilitating [the prostitution] industry would harm communities” and that its criminalization is necessary because the bill ensures “parents do not have to sweep away syringes and condoms from the school grounds of their children” (Goguen, September 26, 2014, 10:10 am). These arguments are reminiscent of previous eras of conservative arguments against sex work, which justified prohibition as necessary to protect citizens from the negative moral public nuisance effects of prostitution (Weitzer, Reference Weitzer2010).
These “not-in-my-backyard” tones and right-handed logics, however, were relatively muted throughout the defence of Bill C-36 and certainly did not make up the crux of speeches. Rather, the vast majority of Bill C-36's victim arguments bore little resemblance to those used in Bill C-10. Much more energy went into describing the contours of victimhood—victims were presented as, “young women . . . lure[d] into [the sex] trade and entrap[ped] within it” (O'Toole, September 26, 2014: 12:20 pm), who were, “vulnerable,” “exploited,” “trafficked,” “coerced,” “beaten” and “innocent” (Smith, October 3, 2014, 10:05 am). In the words of then-Justice Minister Peter MacKay, Bill C-36 “treat[s] the prostitutes themselves as victims, which predominantly they are” (June 12, 2014: 11:40 am).
These victim arguments were also accompanied by changes to the way MPs approach and frame gender. Recall that in the context of Bill C-10, virtually no arguments directly addressed any forms of systemic, gendered or racialized violence (the term gender appears only once in speeches promoting Bill C-10). In stark contrast, women and gender were at the very centre of many of the most frequent arguments in favour of Bill C-36; 43 per cent of speeches explicitly argued that sex work harmed vulnerable young women and sex workers. According to one of the most vocal supporters of Bill C-36, Conservative MP Joy Smith, “prostitution provides an avenue for violence,” “women in prostitution . . . experience alarming levels of violence and abuse” and “prostitution is a form of violence in itself” (June 12, 2014: 1:20 pm). Speeches consistently drew on dramatic stories portraying young women as victims of “Johns who had abused and degraded them for their own sexual pleasure and pimps who had harmed and exploited them to maximize their own profits” (Dechert, October 3, 2014: 1:25 pm).
The near-monolithic framing of women and sex workers as victims was further bolstered by other rhetorical and performative gestures, with speeches invoking a different set of network associations than those used in Bill C-10. For example, 25 per cent of speeches used “prostitution” and “sex trafficking” interchangeably, even though human trafficking is already prohibited by Canadian law. In the words of Joy Smith, being a sex worker “is not a life from a Hollywood movie, portrayed in movies like Pretty Woman. [Sex workers] are very often the most marginalized and victimized of our citizens, vulnerable Canadians, often aboriginal, new Canadians, brought into a life of prostitution at a very early age and most often through no fault of their own” (October 14, 2014, 4:55 pm).
Many arguments also considered the systemic and structural underpinnings of sex work, strongly evoking explicitly feminist logics. In 18.4 per cent of cases, Conservative MPs argued that the mere presence of legal prostitution would be detrimental to gender equality and risks “turn[ing] the clock back years for women's equality” (Smith, June 12, 2014, 1:20 pm). Some of these arguments even took what feminist scholars might consider to be “intersectional forms,” considering how experiences of sex work can be shaped by race, Indigeneity and class (Crenshaw, Reference Crenshaw1991). A common argument was that the “legalization and normalization” of prostitution “would be disastrous for women's equality and for our aboriginal populations” (that sex work disproportionately harms “aboriginal” women was mentioned 11 times) (Smith, June 4, 2014: 1:20 pm). On Robert Goguen's telling, we should not be “normalizing a practice that targets those who are disadvantaged, including because of gender, race, youth, poverty or a history of abuse” (September 26, 2014: 10:10 am).
These arguments about gender, race and class were visually and symbolically reinforced by several performative gestures on the part of the Conservative government. Perhaps most telling was that Bill C-36 came into effect on December 6, 2014, which marks the anniversary of the shooting at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal (which killed 14 women in 1989) and the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women. Moreover, 40 per cent of speeches defending Bill C-36 in parliament were delivered by female MPs. Given only 25 per cent of Conservative MPs were women at the time, this means women were disproportionately more likely to speak in support of the prostitution legislation than their male counterparts (consider, by contrast, only 14.4 per cent of speeches in defence of Bill C-10 were delivered by female MPs). Given the institutional constraints regulating the right to address the House of Commons, it could be the case that this was not intentional on the part of the government. Regardless, the effect of having women defend Bill C-36 is that the credibility of their “pro-women” message is visually reinforced through the embodied gender of the speaker.
If the penal populist arguments made in defence of Bill C-10 are right-handed examples of conservative discourses of victimization, Bill C-36's victim arguments much more closely resemble a left-handed approach. While MPs promised that Bill C-10 would get tough on crime and criminals, the stated objective of Bill C-36 was to introduce a “new criminal law regime [that] seeks to protect the dignity and equality of all Canadians” and treat “prostitution as a form of sexual exploitation that disproportionately impacts women and girls” (Government of Canada, 2014). In its choice of value-language (“toughness” versus “dignity and equality”) and its foregrounding of women and girls, Bill C-36's treatment of both victims and gender diverges significantly in tone and tenor from speeches about crime delivered in Parliament the prior year. Here, left-handed arguments borrowed heavily from feminist concepts and vernacular and implored tones of compassion, understanding and protection. In the words of then-Justice Minister MacKay, “This bill is a comprehensive, compassionate Canadian response” (June 12, 2014: 11:50 am).
4. Contextualizing Victim Claims in Larger Conservative Ideology
Arguments about victims are emotional, widespread and an exceptionally salient form of political argumentation. Moreover, they are essential to Conservative Party politics in Canada. It is not just that discourses of victimization are supplementary or reticent elements of conservative arguments; rather, themes and appeals to victims were fundamental to nearly every Conservative speech made in defence of Bills C-10 and C-36. Moreover, many of these victim arguments are not primarily framed in free-market, neoliberal or populist discourse; they also actively appropriate and redeploy many progressive and feminist arguments about victimization.
However, these bills are also poignant examples of the often contrasting and ambidextrous mobilization of victim arguments by the Harper government. With Bill C-10, right-handed victim arguments appealed to notions of toughness and protection—privileging individualized and common-sense notions of crime and punishment. By contrast, left-handed arguments in the context of Bill C-36 were more likely to consider systemic processes of gendered and racialized victimization, appealing to different softer and affective sensibilities. Ultimately, MPs activated two distinct visceral registers: toughness versus softness, outrage versus compassion, punishment versus understanding.
These findings build on much of the existing scholarship on Conservative Party politics in Canada by, in part, pointing to the continued relevance of populist victim arguments in Canadian conservative politics. In the era of Brexit and Trump, some have suggested that Canada might be immune to the global wave of rightist populist discourse (Adams, Reference Adams2017). However, my analysis highlights that populist arguments are already central components of conservative discourse in Canada—and in ways that transcend their most frequent market-based forms. Rather, there is growing evidence that penal populism is becoming an increasingly salient and pronounced policy direction in larger Conservative Party politics in Canada.
My analysis also sheds light on the relationship between gender and conservatism more generally, highlighting the “paradoxical” forms that gendered discourse can take. For instance, scholars have traced a new direction of policy making and debate in Canada, one that both invisibilizes and individualizes issues for white and Canadian-born women, while simultaneously foregrounding systemic gender discrimination and violence facing “Othered” immigrant and racialized women (Dobrowolsky, Reference Dobrowolsky2008; Arat-Koç, Reference Arat-Koç2012). This trend is marked by a discursive and literal “instrumentalization” of racialized and immigrant women, who are most often presented as “victimized” by their own “barbaric cultural practices” (Gaucher, Reference Gaucher2016). Indeed, the findings presented above build on many of these analyses. For example, despite presenting a comprehensive crime legislation, Bill C-10 contained no provisions related to sexual violence or violence against women. By contrast, sexual violence against women, and particularly against racialized and Indigenous women, was foregrounded in the context of Bill C-36, with a striking 34 per cent of speeches highlighting sexual violence as a governmental concern. This disparity in the discursive treatment of sexual violence strongly suggests that rather than “degendering” the political (Brodie, Reference Brodie2008), there are moments when conservative actors in Canada selectively centre issues and sources of gender inequality, while conspicuously avoiding them in other contexts.
One final question that arises from my analysis is, Why? How can we explain the Conservative government's disparate, contrasting and ambidextrous approach to victims and gender?
On the one hand, these findings should perhaps not surprise us. The fact that gender was foregrounded in Bill C-36—a bill that intersects in explicit ways with women's rights and safety—is just good politics. Having women speak on behalf of women in the context of Bill C-36 allowed for better optics and more convincing claims of representation. However, to conclude, I suggest two alternate explanations that might help explain the Conservative Party's ambidextrous approach to victims.
The first, perhaps unexpectedly, draws on the field of management and its theory of organizational ambidexterity. Developed by R. B. Duncan, organizational ambidexterity refers to an organization's ability to meet the demands of today's business while concurrently adjusting and adapting to tomorrow's changing demands. Just as being ambidextrous means being able to use both the left and right hands, organizational ambidexterity requires management to use both “exploitation” (of previously successful strategies) and “exploration” (of new potential strategies) (O'Reilly and Tushman, Reference O'Reilly and Tushman2013).
Given that political parties are, among other things, organizations—ones that increasingly see citizens as customers (Delacourt, Reference Delacourt2016)—the theory of organizational ambidexterity may be useful in examining party strategy. Extending the metaphor of ambidexterity: Bill C-10—the right hand—represents the “today” of the Conservative Party base. Indeed, Harper's tough on crime approach played very well with the party's loyal core, which tended to disproportionately support more punitive approaches to crime and state security (Paris, Reference Paris2014). Moreover, the tough on crime shift in Conservative Party policy was still widely celebrated by the conservative movement following the 2015 election loss. For instance, at the 2017 Manning Centre Conference—the largest networking conference for Canadian conservatives—the interim leader, Rona Ambrose, insisted that we must stay tough on crime because “coddling criminals doesn't make us safer” (Manning Centre Conference, 2017, author's field notes). Following in these footsteps, Andrew Scheer adroitly “exploited” the rightward turn in crime policy, displaying his party's tough on crime credentials prominently on the Conservative Party website and adopting a conspicuous tough on crime platform during his leadership bid (Artuso, Reference Artuso2018).
However, after 40 years of growing gender equality, even mainstream Canadian conservatism has had to embrace certain tenets of feminism and gender equality. Given that tough on crime mandates are not likely to build new coalitions of support—and might even risk reinforcing powerful affective repulsion in some partisans—it may be anticipated that conservatives are experimenting with leftist forms of victim arguments in other contexts. Moreover, these “exploratory” efforts are not confined to sex work. For instance, Ambrose, while at times adopting a penal populist posture, has also built much of her political legacy around the issue of remedying judicial bias against women and victims in cases of sexual violence. Her last political act before her resignation as MP was to table private member legislation that would amend the Judges Act and the Criminal Code to mandate that all newly appointed judges undergo training to learn about the gendered myths and stereotypes still associated with sexual assault casesFootnote 5 (Tunney, Reference Tunney2020). Moreover, this seems to be part of a growing trend within Canadian conservative circles, with conservative parties at both the federal and provincial levels addressing the issue area of sex trafficking in ways that strongly parallel the Harper government's marketing of Bill C-36 (Canadian Press, 2019). For the most part, these emergent (albeit still peripheral) issue areas have been met with support from Canadian conservatives, perhaps indicating that norms and approaches surrounding gender and victimhood are shifting and expanding.
The second possible (and perhaps complementary) explanation has less to do with the organizational and strategic outreach of political parties and more with the inherent nature of conservative ideology. Contemporary scholars of conservatism tend to argue that, as opposed to its liberal and socialist counterparts, conservatism lacks a substantive, constant and transcendental ideal (Huntington, Reference Huntington1957; Freeden, Reference Freeden1996; Farney, Reference Farney, McGrane and Hibbert2019b). It is argued that conservatism differs from other political ideologies in its immanence, arising most prominently “when other ways of life and thought appear on the scene, against which it is compelled to take up arms in the ideological struggle” (Mannheim, Reference Mannheim and Kecskemeti1953: 98). That conservatives are moved to (re)action by external forces, for example, has led Michael Freeden (Reference Freeden1996) to contend that conservative ideology is best characterized as a pattern of resistance that ebbs and flows with various frequencies and intensities throughout history, emerging in different morphological configurations to meet different historical needs over time. According to Torbjörn Tännsjö (Reference Tännsjö1990), not only is conservatism flexible in its core commitments, it also lacks a substantive ideal, which means it often borrows political concepts and language from its progressive and liberal opponents to make its conservative case. Some have even gone so far as to describe conservatism as the “chameleon” of political ideologies (Freeden, Reference Freeden1996: 329).
The theorization of conservative ideology as reactive might also help us understand the Harper government's ambidextrous mobilization of victim arguments. Bill C-10 could be seen as responding to both ideological pressure from the right of the party's support base and as part of a larger trend of the Americanization of Canadian approaches to crime and sentencing. Webster and Doob, for instance, have argued that the Harper government's tough on crime approach not only represents a “radical departure” from Canada's traditional approach to crime, but also represents a larger paradigmatic shift toward a more American-inspired punitive understanding of criminal justice (Reference Webster and Doob2015: 314). We might, then, consider Bill C-10 as a reaction to (and/or an exploration of) American-based models of crime, retribution and punishment.
An even more compelling case could be made about how left-handed logics invoked in defence of Bill C-36 are a result of the mercurial nature of conservative discourse. Consider that Bill C-36 was a reaction—a forced response to the Bedford Supreme Court decision. While the issue of sex trafficking has grown in conservative salience over the past decade (Cole, Reference Cole2019), changing Canada's prostitution laws would not have been on the Conservative Party's policy radar if not for the unexpected Supreme Court decision, which punted the issue of sex work directly to Parliament and forced Harper's hand. Bill C-36 was quite literally reacting to external judicial powers.
More generally, however, Bill C-36's leftist victim arguments could be considered a response to the shifting ideological, political and policy landscape of the past three decades. Since the 1980s, the political coalition opposed to the legalization of prostitution has, somewhat paradoxically, been led by two main divergent constituencies: religious conservatives and abolitionist feminists. While the two groups may hold opposing views on most social issues—and have traditionally drawn on different discursive rationales for opposing sex work—both camps converge in their opposition to legal sex work. However, in contrast to morally charged conservative arguments about the social ills and public nuisance of prostitution throughout the 1980s, abolitionist feminists tended to frame women as the primary victims of prostitution, with high-profile feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, acting as ambassadors of this perspective. Largely through the language of women's equality and safety, abolitionist feminists argued that prostitution is “an institution of male domination and exploitation,” that it “affects all women” and that its legality “justifies the sale of any woman, and reduces all women to sex” (Dworkin, Reference Dworkin1981).
If the flexible core of conservative ideology is reactive in nature, sex work is a logical site of discursive exploration of leftist victim arguments. Not only have conservatives over the past 30 years reacted to changes in the shifting terrain of feminist politics (and their own internal debates over the morality of sex work), they have also been able to incorporate left-handed victim arguments into their own political vernacular with relative ease, given the existing policy convergence between radical feminists and social conservatives. In this way, a tried and tested left-handed script for opposing legal sex work already existed and, in the context of Bill C-36, was fused relatively easily with more right-handed justifications that vowed to protect Canadian communities and children.
My findings highlight that conservatism in Canada is not static, either in its approach to victims or gender. Rather, conservative victim arguments are flexible and ambidextrous, challenging many of the academic and popular assumptions made about both conservative ideology and the politics of victimhood. We would do well to pay attention to the way that conservative discourse and ideology shifts and mutates across time; recognizing this reality is especially important to understanding the flexible and reactive nature of conservative ideology and politics in Canada.
