Canada's Ongoing Complicity with Exploitive Extraction Schemes
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1498 .... October 18, 2017
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Canada’s Ongoing Complicity with Exploitive Extraction Schemes
Niko Block
On June 15, 1841, the newly established Legislative Council of the Province of Canada -- a body of twenty-four appointed lawmakers -- was gathered in its chamber in Kingston. Its speaker, a businessman and nationalist named Austin Cuvilliers, began the day’s proceedings by reminding his peers of their mandate: "Many subjects of deep importance to the future welfare of the Province demand your early attention," he said, but the most important of them "is the adoption of measures for developing the resources of the Province. The rapid settlement of the country, the value of every man’s property within it, the advancement of his future fortunes are deeply affected by this question."
Three months later, the... legislature created what would become one of Canada’s most important institutions in promoting those objectives: the Canadian Geological Survey, whose purpose was and remains the mapping of geological resources for private exploitation. At the time, it was only the second institution of its kind in the world, following on the heels of Britain’s Geological Survey by only six years. But in the Canadian context, it was also a precedent-setting institution in its own right, because it was very much on the vanguard of settler-colonial strategy. Australia, for instance, did not create a geological survey until a decade later, and the United States did not do so until 1879.
One hundred and seventy-six years later, the Canadian state remains more committed to -- and dependent upon -- the mining business than any other government in the world. Three-quarters of the world’s mining companies today are headquartered in Canada, and approximately 60 per cent of them are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), whose website consistently brags that they broker more than half of global investment in the industry. The bulk of this investment comes from outside of Canada, while the majority of the production it finances also occurs abroad; the TSX is simply a safe and uniquely accommodating conduit for extractive capital.
Outsiders to the world of finance might worry about what it means for Canada to have so many of its eggs in one industrial basket. But from the time of its inception the Canadian government has actually struggled to secure this intimate relationship with the industry, and that strategy has in fact generally succeeded in promoting the state’s central objectives of white settlement and capital expansion. Those objectives, of course, extend far beyond the mining business. They have informed almost every aspect of Canadian government policy, and at a very general level they have been associated with countless humanitarian atrocities -- above all the displacement and dissolution of so many indigenous nations.
But the long and ongoing history of Canadian mining has played a strikingly prevalent role in that broader trajectory. From the nineteenth-century gold rushes to present-day multinational production chains, Canadian miners have all too often committed or condoned acts of violence against rural and indigenous peoples -- sometimes in the name of securing contested land, and sometimes simply because of the ugly dynamics that emerge when hundreds of wayward men descend on small and isolated communities.