Imperial Canada Inc.

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Alain Deneault. Imperial Canada Inc.

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Criminality is like a negative of society.

Eva Joly

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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.

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