Canadian Hansard and Arctic Sovereignty: A Narrative Policy Framework Study

Аннотация

This paper demonstrates that Canadian Hansard, which represents an exact transcript of the debates conducted in the House of Commons of Canada, is a valuable source for analyzing political positions on Arctic sovereignty using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). Unlike sporadic official documents, Hansard offers a continuous empirical dataset. While our research supports the NPF postulates, it proposes a complementary methodological approach through a Canadian narrative case study. Our findings suggest that MPs’ narratives align with those in official governmental publications and policy frameworks, reflecting the NPF’s primacy of groups and networks and narrative cognition postulates. Even though small to moderate lexicon differences were found in debates on Canadian Arctic sovereignty among the political parties, we observed a consistent lexicon across political affiliations. The period analysis demonstrated that Conservative MPs’ narratives align with what is expected based on NPF postulates. However, the policy reorientation in terms of beliefs, values, and norms caused by the Northern Strategy in conjunction with wavering leadership and unclear Arctic priorities created internal inconsistencies within the Liberal and New Democratic Party (NDP) narratives. These observations suggest that MPs’ narratives are more ambiguous than initially assumed, since they can deviate from official documents or publications because of current events before reverting to their core preferences. This study underscores the potential for continual empirical analysis of Hansard and the NPF’s applicability in Canadian policy studies.