News Analysis
In the early days of Ottawa’s frantic push to dissuade the incoming Trump administration from imposing sweeping tariffs, cabinet ministers began reusing a term that hadn’t been in the government’s lexicon since mid-2018: “illegal migration.”
Prior to this, the government called it “irregular migration,” in line with the shift in language south of the border under the previous administration to be more “inclusive” regarding these issues, as well as the media adopting the term in their style guides since the mid-2010s.
The same trend was seen when the Liberal government started using the term “carbon tax” earlier this year once it decided to drop the measure, as it had proved politically costly. Up until then, the government had termed the levy “pollution pricing” or “carbon pricing.“…