What’s ‘fairness’ got to do with it? Discourse coalitions, arguments, and discursive struggles over public funding of Ontario’s private schools

ABSTRACT The establishment of the Commission on Private Schools in Ontario in 1984 renewed long-standing debate over public funding of the Canadian province’s public schools. Engaging Maarten Hajer’s discourse coalition approach and argumentative discourse analysis, we demonstrate how actors with disparate – sometimes even competing – goals and values nevertheless formed coalitions to advocate for (or against) the policy. We also show that the debate at this time was about much more than school funding; it reflected foundational disputes over the appropriate role of government in relation to minoritized groups in Canada. In the struggle to define the meaning of a policy to fund private schools with public money, both coalitions mobilised arguments informed by discourses of Equality and Multiculturalism. However, each coalition ascribed different meanings to these discourses. That is, actors on both sides argued their policy solution promoted equality and supported multiculturalism based on different ideological understandings of these values.