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Canada’s ongoing complicity with exploitive extraction schemes
Canadian BusinessOne hundred and seventy-six years on, the Canadian state today 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. The bulk of this investment comes from outside of Canada, while the majority of the production it finances also occurs abroad.
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For the 150th, let’s also re-make our economic myths
Canadian BusinessEvery society needs its myths. But as much as myths and stories can empower, they can also be damaging. Here are three economic myths about Canada that could use re-writing. The first economic myth to remake is that we are “hewers of wood and drawers of water” — or, in more contemporary terms, extractors of some of the dirtiest fossil fuels known to humankind.
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Where One Canadian Mining Company Goes, Violence Follows
Canadian BusinessCanadians have heard almost nothing from the dominant media about Banro’s violent quest for billions of dollars in minerals. The little that has been reported is mostly the company justifying its operations. But where are the voices of ordinary Congolese? Don’t they deserve to be heard? Canadians need to know what this country’s mining companies are doing around the world.
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Corrupt Canadian Banking Practices
Canadian BusinessCIBC is not only the Canadian bank with operations in a Caribbean financial haven. In fact, Canadian institutions dominate the region’s unsavoury banking sector. In 2013 CIBC, RBC and Scotiabank accounted for more than 60 percent of regional banking assets. In 2008 The Economist reported Canadian banks controlled “the English-speaking Caribbean’s three largest banks, with $42 billion in assets, four times those commanded by its forty-odd remaining locally owned banks.”
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Toronto’s Buried History: The Dark Story of How Mining Built a City
Canadian BusinessToronto is a city built on mining. Nearly 75% of mining companies globally are headquartered in Canada and almost 60% are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). In 2015, more than half of all capital investment in the mining business travelled through the exchange. In fact, few, if any, other capital markets around the world are as specialised in a single industry as Toronto is in mining.
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Trudeau’s Oil Views Spur African Famine
AfricaToday the lives of over 10 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk due to a drought at least partly caused by climate change. A study by Britain’s Met Office concluded that human-induced climate disturbances sparked a famine in Somalia in 2011 in which over 50,000 died.
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Profits, Coercion, and Resistance in Latin America
Canadian BusinessWhat forms have Canadian capitalist expansion and Canadian state interference in Latin America assumed in recent decades? How have Latin American workers, peasants, and indigenous communities – dispossessed and exploited by Canadian capital – responded in turn? What precisely are the contours of this dialectic of accumulation by dispossession and popular resistance?
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A Brief History of Canadian Labour Woes
Canadian BusinessIn addition to a loss of union jobs, globalization also accelerated Canada’s shift from a manufacturing to a service sector-dominated nation, further weakening prospects for organizing. Much of this has to do with precarity, as non-standard work provides employers increased flexibility in scheduling, hiring, lay-offs and firing, acting as tools in employers’ arsenals to fight a drive.
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Canada’s Household Debt Crisis: Blame Capitalism!
Canadian BusinessThe Bank of Canada’s last report reached the same scary conclusion “Canada’s dangerous brew of debt and inflated house prices could combine to devastate the economy,” Maclean’s reports.This should ring a bell to anyone with a passing familiarity with Marxist economics and the theory of the crisis of overproduction, in particular.
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Toxic Tsunami
Canadian BusinessWith governments acting as complicit handmaidens of private mining companies, it is only social movements and public institutional voices from churches and universities that stand for an end to corporate impunity. We need to up our game in defending not only the workers and communities affected by mining, but also the very land and watersheds and ecological systems that extractivism destroys.
