The ten years during which Justin Trudeau was prime minister of Canada were tumultuous. At first, the Trudeau government worked to distinguish itself as progressive, in contrast to the United States during Donald Trump’s first presidency. Then it faced crises related to Covid-19, to the discovery of gravesites at residential schools, to the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, and finally to the return of Trump as the U.S. president. Each of these events had an impact on Canadians’ sense of identity in frequently polarizing ways.
In this project, I propose to describe how this impact changed over time by focusing on Trudeau’s o icial speeches as sites of negotiation over meaning. He gave 326 speeches between 2015 and 2024, as archived on the Prime Minister’s website (www.pm.gc.ca), reflecting the ways he was both responding to Canadians and trying to persuade them. However, the corpus of speeches is so large – nearly half a million words – that analyzing it using conventional approaches such as close reading or discourse analysis would be a herculean task. Thus, I am proposing to use text mining tools to overcome the problem of scale.
My objectives are twofold. First, I will describe the forces shaping Canadians’ sense of themselves in relation to those they perceived as “other.” Words such as feminist, reconciliation, mandate, protest, and even freedom became focal points for controversy, metonyms standing in for larger debates about policy and identity. I will link changing patterns of word use to changing patterns of meaning and, by extension, Canadians’ contested collective self-perception. Second, I will contribute to theories of meaning, using the corpus of Trudeau’s speeches to address the challenge and promise of large corpora for observing change in meaning over time. I will build on alreadyexisting tools that use statistical analysis to identify relationships between words in a corpus. I will show how these tools complement hermeneutics, linking patterns of use to patterns of interpretation. The implications of my analysis of Trudeau’s speeches will reach beyond Canada’s recent history: my account of meaning will provide insight into situations in other contexts (such as journalism) where words acquire an evolving ideological charge.
This project builds on a pending SSHRC Insight Development Grant, submitted in February 2026. If the grant is funded, the student(s) participating in the project proposed here will join me and a PhDlevel researcher. (I will go through with the project even if it is not funded, albeit on a smaller scale.) I have a strong track record in mentoring undergraduate students through the research process. Similar projects in Winter 2025, for instance, led to publications with undergraduate co-authors (DOI 10.1080/0907676X.2025.2590066, published in 2025, and DOI 10.20381/9082-d564, currently under review). This project will lead to a similar outcome: I will be editing a collective work on the evolution of keywords in Trudeau’s speeches, and participating student(s) will co-author a chapter tracing the evolution of one keyword over the course of Trudeau’s mandate.