Reconsidering Crisis: Discourse, Identity and the Opioid “Crisis” in Canada

• In Event: Disasters, Crises and Responses in the 21st Century

Abstract

This paper considers the role of policy feedback, with a specific interest in the role of discourse and identity, between government and civil society during a “crisis period.” Particularly, I am interested in the discursive construction of the opioid crisis – who is part of the crisis, at what point has crisis occurred? Rather than natural disasters which we can observe, or economic crises which are marked by financial periods of uncertainty, the idea of a health crisis is much more subjective and calls into question which identities are important and which are valued more so that, when those identities are threatened, a crisis occurs – these assumptions may incur racial or classist biases. In order to do this research, I present a mixed-methodology of discursive analysis of documents from civil society organizations, hansard, and government press releases, as well as a quantitative content analysis of print and online media. The results of this data collection are then used as pieces of a policy feedback loop – a back-and-forth communication between government, organizations, and the media – to determine at what point an opioid crisis occurred, what underlying assumptions there are in constructing "crisis", as well as ways that the federal government has attempted to mitigate this crisis.

Author

• Megan Aiken, University of Alberta