The framing of TMX as vital to the national interest, and further cloaked with a national security rationale, could make infringement all the more compelling. At the same time, it provides the justification, within Canada’s legal framework, to take measures to prevent opponents from disrupting Canada’s imagined energy future by defining them as threats to (future) national security.

The Harper government’s agenda of aggressively expanding and accelerating resource extraction projects has identified Indigenous Peoples as the primary obstacle to this vision. As a result, since 2006, the Canadian state has intensified surveillance of Indigenous people, groups, and peaceful political action. This surveillance is carried out by a web of police, intelligence agencies, government bureaucracies, regulators and private corporations.