Our data set comprised documents employed by the three government-funded programs
that were direct products of Canada’s Innovation Strategy: the Canada Foundation for
Innovation, the Workplace Skills Strategy, and the Canadian Council for Learning. In each
case, we examined a general document describing the program’s goals, rationale, activities
and intended outcomes, and selected calls for proposals released between 2004 and early
2007. In the cases of the CFI and the CCL, several annual cycles have occurred for their
funding programs, so we focused on the most recent calls for proposals at the time of
analysis from each fund. This created a manageable data set that allowed the in-depth
textual analysis we needed to examine the discourses at play in these expressions of federal
priorities. We also found that restricting our sample to the most recent calls for proposals
permitted a comparative analysis that was sensitive to the temporal and evolving political
dimensions of these funding cycles. All documents were published through and retrieved
from the Internet. The source of the documents in our study is important, as each program
has used the Internet almost exclusively to disseminate programmatic information and the