A Failure to Communicate: Government of Alberta’s Bill 6 and the rural Albertan response in late 2015

  • Author(s) / Creator(s)
  • This capstone examines the rural Albertan reaction to the Government of Alberta’s legislation of new farm and ranch safety requirements and includes a content analysis of comments from people who signed the largest petition against Bill 6. Through a case study with the use of deductive quantitative content analysis to explore the rural consciousness and perceptions of Alberta’s Bill 6 as collected in an online petition against the government, my research explores how rural Albertan protesters responded during the Bill 6 debate, and what this reveals about rural culture and politics in this province. This research employs Cramer Walsh’s (2012) concept and typology of rural consciousness as a lens to examine how the petition comments illuminate the response to Bill 6. Overall, the case study found a strong presence of rural identity and distrust reflected in the data, with key element framing rural identity being the group consciousness of the rural community with values and lifestyle including hard work and family, and top targets of distrust and blame for injustice towards the rural community identified as the government and urban political elites.

  • Date created
    2021-06-23
  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Type of Item
    Report
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-aa3z-5q98
  • License
    Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International