Internally Displaced Persons in Canadian News Discourse

The Case of the 2016 Alberta Fires

Abstract

Although the concept of environmental refugees has been circulating for more than thirty years, not much has been written about how the displacement of people caused by environmental disasters has entered into public discourses. More specifically, within the empirical investigations into the discourses on environmental displacement, the phenomenon of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) moving inside the borders of their own countries as an effect of disasters has received little critical attention with respect to how it is framed.
The present article explores the discursive constructions of IDPs in Canadian news discourse which refer to the destructive 2016 Alberta fire in Fort McMurray, the heart of the tar sands region. Thus, a corpus of news reports is analysed in a discourse-analytical perspective with the intent of identifying specific discursive strategies, frames and patterns in the representation of the social actors within newspaper narratives. The analysis shows that the representations of IDPs in the corpus under investigation are characterized by different patterns of language choice compared to those emerging from the discourses on climate refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in general, evident in previous studies. In the end, what becomes also apparent is that nomination strategies are connected to specific ideologies in discourse, on the basis of which the correlation between the tar sands and the fire is either omitted or mildly unveiled.