All this is troubling, but what is even more disquieting is that the Canadian public as a whole finds itself in a position of financing Canadian mining companies out of its own savings. As taxpayers, citizens provide the funds for public investment bodies such as the Canada Pension Fund or the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. Canadian citizens also put money into many private (most often mutual fund) investments. Whenever we contribute to retirement funds, buy insurance, invest in RRSPs, or put money in savings accounts at banks or credit unions, we are sending money to be invested on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and a good part of this money will probably end up in the mining industry. These investments are made in companies often named in damning reports such as the Lutundula report for having taken advantage of the chaos prevailing in the Congo in the 1990s to sign one-sided contracts or stake out their position.68
The tragic conflicts that devastated and caused millions of deaths in the Eastern Congo between 1996 and 2003 were all essentially wars for the control of mineral and oil resources. Tens of millions of Canadian dollars were invested in our name, and to our benefit, by companies that stand accused of looting the resources of the African continent and other countries of the South and Eastern Europe for stock-market speculation.69
Alcan, Falconbridge, and Noranda were the companies that pioneered Canadian mining explorations and operations abroad, initially in Latin America and South Africa in the 1960s. The world’s mining companies then became aware of the business opportunities open to them if they registered in Canada, and in order to benefit from the well-known generosity of Canadian institutions, they listed themselves on the Toronto Stock Exchange. There was now a politically legitimate way of plundering the resources of Latin America and Asia, both shaken by repeated financial crises, or of weak African states often caught up in violent armed conflicts. Today, according to the TSX, “Nearly 50% of the 9,300 mineral exploration projects held by TSX & TSXV companies are outside of Canada.”70 Some 185 Toronto-based firms are operating or prospecting in Africa on a total of 684 projects; 286 firms are working on 1,651 projects in Latin America; 315 projects are registered in Europe and Russia; and 1,275 in the United States.71
The financial behaviour of these companies and their shareholders does not really reflect the autonomy of decision-makers in a free-market economy. The Canadian government has structured Canadian laws and regulations to channel investment capital toward the mining industry. Following the Whitehorse Mining Initiative launched by the Mining Association of Canada, in the early 1990s Ottawa won acceptance by a cross-section of representatives of civil society for a program of tax reductions and weakening of mining-industry regulations. The term “good governance” made its appearance at this time, along with all the ethical considerations, “standards,” “incentives,” and ideas of “corporate social responsibility” that generally follow in its wake. Facing the challenges of a recession period, the mining industry was looking for government support and intimated that it could turn the Canadian economy around if Ottawa were to establish an advantageous public policy context.
The federal government adopted a new mining policy in 1996, and several provincial governments followed its lead in order to promote the rapid development of their mining industry. It turned out that they were just in time to take advantage of political realignments taking place in Africa, and elsewhere in the South, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In central Africa, a major turning point was the fall of dictator Mobutu in what was known then as Zaire, an event that touched off a headlong rush for Congolese mineral resources. The Canadian government did not merely encourage Canadian financial investment specifically in the mining sector. It also demonstrated its belief that it was responsible for supporting the Canadian mining industry abroad, for ensuring the industry’s market capitalization (which meant attracting foreign investment), and for making these actions legitimate in the eyes of its citizens.
Because Canada, as a state completely dedicated to its extractive industry, has induced its citizens to participate in the extractive economy, Canadians today are now seeing their assets grow, financing their retirement, and accumulating consumer goods based on the controversial activity of mining companies held responsible, in documents from credible sources, for looting and polluting the countries of the South; often in these documents, the activities of the mining companies are viewed as the direct cause of war in these countries. In the 1990s, children in the Great Lakes region of Africa were handed Kalashnikovs to guard or seize deposits of coltan needed to produce millions of video-game consoles given as gifts to children in the West.
Around the World: Mining Laws Based on Canada’s Example
All over the world, Canada can claim responsibility for the appearance of a new generation of mining codes. These codes provide corporations and shareholders with the same generous provisions as the Quebec and Ontario mining codes: negligible taxes, full socialization of costs, disregard for customary and native rights, contempt for environmental issues, absence of regulations governing corporate behaviour, and the list goes on. Particularly in countries with a developed mining sector, whenever new, neo-liberal rules of “good governance” were imposed on the population, at the same time a legal, financial, political, and human resources framework was established to suit the needs of the extractive industry. Canada has been active in drafting a number of these mining investment policies in countries in the South, including Colombia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Guinea, and Zambia. Mining-industry companies, 75 percent of which are registered in Canada according to official sources,72 were also invited to participate in drafting these policies, while the World Bank consulted eighty firms to have a clearer view of the Eldorado that these indebted states would soon become. An explosion of Canadian mining investment has taken place in recent years: it reached a high of $12.5 billion in 2011.73
The new mining codes that Canada has exported throughout the world – partly through the Canadian government’s influence on agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank – all share one troubling characteristic: in contrast to earlier formal and informal codes in many of these countries, the new rules do not explicitly recognize the right of Aboriginal peoples to exploit the resources of their traditional lands, where they often carried out artisanal small-scale mining linked to local capital. Instead, public authorities are set up to “solve” the thorny issue of the ancestral presence of indigenous peoples on these lands, by subordinating it to the interests of Western corporations.
According to Amnesty International, Canada exerted intense diplomatic pressure to convince countries of the South to join it in opposing the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.74 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Canada should show no concern when a country draws up a mining code without any consultation with its indigenous peoples. This is what happened in Colombia in 2001, even though the redefinition of “indigenous territory” was a violation of Colombian law. The new Colombian code modified the redistribution of benefits from the extractive sector so that they no longer need to be paid to local (Aboriginal) communities.
Canada intervened directly in the Colombian restructuring process. As early as 1996, $11.3 million were given to “improve” the institutional operations of the Colombian ministry of mines and energy and the ministry of the environment. A portion of the funds came from the Alberta-based Canadian Energy Research Institute. 75 CIDA also approved financing in the amount of $241,861 in technical assistance to the Colombian government’s Plan Pacifico.76 Nearly one-third of this amount was paid out to Ottawa-based Radarsat International Inc., which in conjunction with the Canadian Space Agency markets a satellite technology for analyzing soil and subsoil relief.77
Ironically, according to