Interrogating ‘invisibilization’ and ‘instrumentalization’: women and current citizenship trends in Canada

Human Trafficking and Media Myths: Federal Funding, Communication Strategies, and Canadian Anti-Trafficking Programs

“…this plays a strong role in the federal government's current interest in anti-trafficking measures. Combining securitization with a desire for a greater control over immigration, the Conservative government, with its neoliberal agenda, has been given a window of opportunity to kill two birds with one stone (Dobrowolsky, 2008). At the same time, though, the Conservative position draws on broader national and international trends.…”

“…In addition to this focus on information management, the Conservative government has tended to place issues of security and policing higher on the agenda than the other major political parties (Dobrowolsky, 2008). this plays a strong role in the federal government's current interest in anti-trafficking measures.…”

The Harper Government's New Right Neoliberal Agenda and the Dismantling of Status of Women Canada and the Family Violence Initiative

“…As has been the case with women's policy machineries in Europe and Australia, Status of Women Canada has been subject to what is now a more than two decade-long succession of reductions to its funding and authority, reductions that ironically coincided with cross jurisdictional acceptance of gender mainstreaming as a policy goal (Bacchi and Eveline 2003;Brodie 2007Brodie , 2008Dobrowolsky 2008;Gabriel and MacDonald 2005;Hankivsky 2008 In Canada, the 'pinnacle' (Rodgers and Knight 2011: 573) Canada-funded projects demonstrate that they contributed to the economic wellbeing of women. As part of this, it began imposing measurable outcomes and associated indicators of innovation and performance upon competing grant applicants and, for the first time in Status of Women Canada's history, extended funding eligibility to for-profit agencies (Knight and Rodgers 2012: 267).…”

“…Indeed, a stridently entrepreneurial market state that aims to govern more by market transactions than by elected officials is said to be sweeping the globe in 'a vast tidal wave of institutional reform and discursive adjustment' (Harvey 2007: 23). Strategically imagined, orchestrated and diffused by networks of right-wing and progressive think-tanks, this new governance strategy takes varying, multiple and contradictory forms and styles, ranging from the rhetorically inclusive social investment activation model that prevailed in Canada under the previous Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien (1993-2003 and Paul Martin (2004Martin ( -2006, to the explicitly exclusive, authoritarian, hyper-punitive, hyper-controlling and hyper-politicized blend of fiscal and social conservatism advanced by Harper's reconstituted Conservative Party of Canada from 2006 1 until its loss in November 2015 to Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party (see also Aucoin 2012;Behiels 2010;Dobrowolsky 2008;Gutstein 2014;Mahon 2008;Mann 2014;Morrow, Hankivsky and Varcoe 2004;Snow and Moffitt 2012).…”

Constructions of migrant rights in Canada: is subnational citizenship possible?

“…In practice, the federal government has retained authority over immigration control while immigrant integration policy (managing the recruitment, settlement and integration of desired immigrants) has been significantly downloaded to provincial and municipal governments (Boushey and Luedtke 2006). Ong (1999) argues that market citizenship and the logic of economic reason permeates the neoliberal state espousing clear gendered (Schild 2000) and racial assumptions (Dobrowolsky 2008). Increasingly, the reinvented welfare state envisaged by Hewitt (1996) has achieved ascendancy as a state designed to: …(P)romote participation in social institutions and particularly, the labour market…to build the capacity of individuals -their capacity to learn, to earn, and to take responsibility, and to contribute to relationships with others, within families and the wider community (p. 260, emphasis added).…”