Montfort Closed: Never? The Nationalistic Discourse of SOS Montfort in Franco-Ontarian Newspapers
This article seeks to understand the impact of the discursive strategies used by the SOS Montfort coalition in the Franco-Ontarian media space during the crisis surrounding the closure of the Montfort Hospital between 1997 and 2002. By analyzing the province’s main French-language regional newspapers, the author evaluates the mobilizing capacity of the nationalist discourse generated by the hospital’s defenders through the prism of regionalisms in French Ontario. While SOS Montfort attempts to turn the hospital closure into a provincial and national crisis, Franco-Ontarians in other regions must deal with the real possibility of losing access to French-language health care as a result of the province-wide health services rationalization process. While SOS Montfort has succeeded in carving out the closure of Montfort as a major crisis in French Ontario, namely by tapping into the Franco-Ontarian referential imaginary, its inability to include regional issues in its discourse has limited its impact outside of Ottawa, where the hospital offers no services.