Abstract
This paper explores discursive strategies of opponents of the Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker project – a proposal to link Alberta oil sands producers to international markets via Canada’s West Coast. It explores how regional concerns about Northern Gateway helped galvanize a movement led by regional First Nations, environmentalists, and settler communities, all of whom opposed Gateway as a means to protect regional ecosystems – and the local communities dependent on them – from “extra-regional” Gateway-backing elites. By articulating arguments against Northern Gateway with salient collective action frames concerning ecological sustainability, regional identity, Indigenous sovereignty, social justice, and democratic agency, this anti-Gateway ‘discourse coalition’ helped contribute to the project’s ultimate collapse in 2016. In this paper, we critically engage with Ernesto Laclau’s theorization of populism to analyse this movement as a form of “regional ecological populism”, explaining how a shift in spatial framing from the national to the regional enabled a particular variant of populist discourse to emerge. Furthermore, we relate Laclau’s framework to Hajer’s concept of discursive “storylines” and Gamson’s analysis of “collective action frames” to pivot away from Laclau’s focus on the ontological construction of unified popular subjects to a more grounded analysis of how coalitions articulate populist storylines designed to mobilize diverse movement constituents. In doing so, we draw on a frame analysis of communications materials produced by several prominent First Nations and environmental organizations publicly mobilizing against Northern Gateway between 2010 and 2015, tracing how these groups came to articulate a common regional ecological populist storyline. Finally, we end with some thoughts about the possibilities and challenges for scaling up regional ecological populism in Canada.
Highlights
In recent years, defenders of Canada’s oil and gas industry have turned to nationalist and conservative populist storylines to frame development as a boon to Canadian workers and taxpayers, while denigrating environmentalist opponents as foreign-backed elites (Neubauer, 2019)
We explore how the fight against Northern Gateway led to the articulation of an ecological populist storyline oriented around regional places and identities, ecological sustainability, Indigenous sovereignty, local democracy, and social justice
We argue that the rejection of Gateway became just such a signifier, standing in for various demands appealing to different actors within the movement
Summary
Defenders of Canada’s oil and gas industry have turned to nationalist and conservative populist storylines to frame development as a boon to Canadian workers and taxpayers, while denigrating environmentalist opponents as foreign-backed elites (Neubauer, 2019). The Gateway project and its perceived injustices provided just such a “singular element,” through which actors could articulate a chain of equivalential demands related to Indigenous sovereignty; protection of coastal ecosystems, economies and cultures; climate change; industry capture of the state apparatus; and regional democratic accountability Such common cause did not emerge out of an a priori unified regional identity— an unlikely development given long-standing tensions between settler and Indigenous communities generated by the Canadian colonial project. Some were identified from a literature review of previous studies of environmental communications and energy politics (Gunster and Saurette, 2014; Neubauer, 2019); Indigenous reconciliation and decolonial politics (Coulthard, 2014); political ecology of the Canadian oil sands and contemporary pipeline projects, and related environmental and economic risks (Nikiforuk, 2010; Davidson and Gismondi, 2011; Lee, 2012; Fast, 2014); and populist politics (Hall, 1988; Laclau, 2007; Frank, 2012). British Columbians from all walks of life—including B.C.’s municipalities, First Nations, unions, businesses, and the provincial government—who care deeply about the communities and the province in which they live, have said no to Enbridge in no uncertain terms . . . . (Sierra Club BC, 2014, June)
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