← Antisemitism in the Canadian Hansard
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Almost every member of the House condemns antisemitism. They do not condemn it on the same grounds. One speaker reaches for equal citizenship and the Charter, another for hate-crime statistics and whether a programme works, a third for what the world will think of Canada, a fourth for a neighbourhood and an inherited memory. Those are not stylistic differences. They are different claims about what makes the harm a harm — and, in Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's term, different orders of worth.
This page takes their framework, from On Justification: Economies of Worth (1991), and applies it to every coded statement in the corpus.
Percentages are of the 2,685 statements carrying at least one order. They sum to more than 100 because a statement may rest on several.
Raw shares would mostly repeat one fact: civic worth is the common tongue of Parliament, and every group leans on it. The index separates the groups where a raw share cannot — it divides a group's share of an order by the share across the whole corpus. 1.00 means the group uses that order exactly as often as everyone else. 1.50 means half again as often; 0.50, half as often.
Bars run right of the centre line when a group sits above the corpus average and left when it sits below, and they clip at 2.5 so one outlier cannot rescale the rest.The share of statements resting on each order, decade by decade. Each panel is scaled to its own maximum, so read the shape rather than comparing heights between panels; the peak is printed on each. Decades before 1990 rest on a few dozen statements and a handful of speakers, so the early movement is noisy.
Parties with at least twenty-five coded statements. Party and era are confounded here, and badly for the small ones: Social Credit is almost entirely the 1940s and 1950s, so what reads as a party signature may be a period one.
Which side of the House a speaker sat on, on the day they spoke. The two sides are not answering the same prompts — a minister defending a programme has reason to reach for evidence and machinery that a critic does not — so read this as a difference in position, not in conviction.
The House of Commons, the Senate, and House committees. Committee evidence is available only from 2006, so the committee column is a modern one.
Condemning antisemitism, reporting an incident, blaming someone for failing to act, naming someone as antisemitic, or disputing that a charge holds. This is where the orders do the most work: the grounds a speaker reaches for track the political act closely.
Each of these rests on a single order and no other, which is uncommon — most statements blend two. They are drawn only from statements that condemn or report, so that choosing an illustration does not put a named person in a bad light on our authority rather than on the record's.
The orders are the most interpretive tag in the project, and they should be read as exploratory. Two independent model passes agreed on the primary order for about seven statements in ten; where they disagreed, the record carries both. Boltanski and Thévenot built the framework from disputes in French firms and public administration, not from a chamber where almost everyone condemns and the disagreement is about grounds.
Era confounds party. Social Credit spoke almost entirely in the 1940s and 1950s, so its signature may belong to the decade rather than the party. The same caution applies, more weakly, to the Bloc and the NDP, whose statements cluster after 1990.
Ministers and critics also face different questions. A minister answers for a programme and reaches for what a programme has: budgets, training, numbers. A critic has none of that to point to. Some of the government/opposition gap is that difference in position rather than in belief.
The full definition of each order · How the coding was done · Filter the corpus by order of worth