The Canadian Mining Journal, an industry magazine catered to insiders, has released its annual ranking of Canada’s top 40 miners. Describing 2022 as “a remarkable year” for Canada’s largest mining companies, editor Tamer Elboki praised the mining sector for “prov[ing] to be as solid and robust as it could be” in the face of the pandemic and geopolitical instability.

Coups, colonialism, and various forms of political subterfuge are important elements in explaining the unequal terms of global exchange. Reducing global inequities requires economic interventions irrespective of “free-market” ideology or WTO rules. It is unsurprising that Canadian capital is hostile to measures that chip away at inequities they benefit from.

Two Canadian mining companies have drawn the ire of activists and Indigenous groups in Ecuador, where the government is using Toronto-based Adventus Mining’s Curipamba copper-gold project in Las Naves and Atico Mining’s La Plata project in Sigchos as test sites to impose a new and controversial process for environmental consultation under Decree 754.

A central focus of the Ford government is exploiting the “Ring of Fire” region in the northern James Bay Lowlands, despite the resistance of Indigenous nations there. These nations assert that the provincial government has failed in its consultation duties, and that its drive to exploit the area’s minerals is endangering the region’s peatlands, which act as crucial carbon sinks.

Environmentalists like Mariano Abarca face tremendous oppression from foreign-owned mining companies. This means, inevitably, that they face the wrath of Canadian companies, given that Canada-based companies make up 41 percent of the largest firms in Latin America. Community activists who oppose Canadian mines are frequently harassed, intimidated, or killed.

As Owen Schalk and Henry Heller explain, given Ottawa’s increasingly belligerent actions in the Pacific, its growing military cooperation with states hostile to Beijing, and the openly antagonistic way Canadian officials discuss China, it seems that Canada wants to delink its economy from China’s in order to prepare for a direct military confrontation.

When it comes to critical minerals, Canada and the US are dead set on replacing China’s supply with reserves elsewhere, namely Latin America and Africa. And given the exploitative way that mining firms function, “decoupling” means more exploitation, more undermining of state sovereignty, and more conflict with those who oppose selling out their mining industries to foreign capital.

AMLO’s mining reforms are an expansion of his efforts to reduce foreign domination of Mexico’s mineral reserves, and part of his wider “Fourth Transformation” program of securing national sovereignty over the country’s lucrative resources. Up until now, his actions toward the sector have taken the form of freezing new mining and water permits for foreign companies.

These struggles in the remote corners of our country are consequential and often we in the south hear very little about what actually happened, when we hear anything at all. Thanks to this book the story of the so far successful battle against uranium mining in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut has a compelling container.

It is clear that most Ecuadorians do not view their future as one of neoliberalism, blind openness to foreign capital, and subservience to Canadian mining companies. But the opinions of the majority have never altered the character of Canada’s foreign policy, and they aren’t doing so in the case of Ecuador, where Guillermo Lasso has retained Ottawa’s support.