Canadaland: Commons

Introducing our new season… Mining

Stories about the dirty business of Canadian mining.

Mining is a dirty business, but it is what Canada does best. Three-quarters of the world’s mining companies are best right here in the Great White North.

In our new season, Commons: Mining, we’ll be digging deep into the practices and the history of the extractive industry. From the gold rushes that shaped the country to the cover-ups and the outright frauds at home and abroad.

Canada was built on extracting what lay under the land, no matter the damage it did or who it ended up hurting.

The first episode of Commons: Mining comes out on October 13th.

Canada is fake

Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.

Extraction Empire

Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.

Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).

Theft on a grand scale

It’s really been about theft on a grand scale. Look at how the United Kingdom became rich, or England and then Britain as it was, at the time. It was through bleeding India dry, we bled $45 trillion out of India. We taxed the subcontinent until there was virtually nothing left, then used a small amount of that tax money to buy its goods. So we were buying goods with their own money. And then we used the phenomenal profits — 100% profits — from that enterprise to finance the capture of other nations, and the colonization of those nations and the citizens, the railways and the other things we built in order to drain wealth out of them.

— George Monbiot