Canadian Capital and Extractive Imperialism

Blood of Extraction is a book about the seamy side of Canadian foreign policy. Its aim is to shed light on the ways in which the Canadian state exercises its (secondary) imperial power to facilitate the expansion of Canadian capital in Latin America. These mechanisms include pushing for neoliberal reforms, underregulating the Toronto Stock Exchange, providing tax benefits, direct subsidies, and diplomatic support to Canadian mining companies operating abroad, and refusing to regulate them outside of the country (Tetreault, 2013). One of the major contributions of this book is its ability to discredit a number of old claims and myths centering around Canada’s commitment to democracy and human rights overseas.

Gordon and Webber’s book takes us over a wide range of environmental and human rights abuses, unveiling that “the wealth repatriated to Canadian companies is routinely covered in blood and dirt” (181)—a direct allusion to Marx’s famous insistence that capitalism stalks about the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx, 1990 [1887]: 926). It draws together important material from a wide range of academic, journalistic, and governmental sources, including documents released through access-to-information requests in Canada, as well as insights gained from dozens of interviews with trade unionists, indigenous activists, peasant militants, human rights lawyers, feminists, and environmentalists throughout the region. Simply attaining the access to information they have is in itself quite an achievement. The result is a lengthy (390 pp.) but extremely readable, fascinating, and horrifying account of the machinations and depredations of Canadian extractive capital in Latin America today.

Thus, in Blood of Extraction we are provided with a lucid description of the realities of Canadian imperialism—the key focus of the book. Not only do the authors go to great lengths to show that the foreign policies of Canada benefit primarily the interests of Canadian capital rather than those of the citizens, let alone the peoples of Latin America, but also they offer rather detailed coverage of the vicious methods of Canadian imperialism. In this context, the book’s catalogue of violent appropriation of natural resources includes “murder, death threats, assaults, and arbitrary detention against opponents of resource extraction” (28). Here the authors might have drawn more on the Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas, whose concept of extrahección—a term coined to capture “the most acute cases of the appropriation of natural resources, where these are extracted using violence and where human rights and the rights of nature are violated” (Gudynas, 2013: 15)—is directly applicable.

Gordon and Webber’s aim, however, is not just to catalogue environmental and human rights abuses inflicted by Canadian mining companies but to examine how popular movements have responded to these abuses and what strategies of resistance may lead to their effective control. In doing so, they “avoid an essay portrayal of [Latin American] people as merely the passive victims of imperial abuse” (33). Through a series of “ethnographies of opposition” (61) they shed important light on the various subaltern class forces at work in the emergence and development of organized popular rejection and struggles against Canadian imperialism. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, particularly given the previous work of one of the authors (i.e., Gordon, 2010: Chap. 2), there is no attempt to draw parallels with or divergences from the anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America and the experiences of other antiextractivist movements within Canada.

This book is organized into four parts. Gordon and Webber begin Part 1 by introducing their theoretical framework for understanding Canada’s role within the world capitalist system as a secondary imperialist power (for a formidable rebuttal to Garrod and Macdonald’s [2016] dismissal of their earlier work in this area [specifically, Gordon and Webber, 2008], see Gordon and Webber [2019]). This theoretical discussion is woven into a political economy analysis of the shifting dynamics in Latin America since the 2000s, characterized by “the region’s return to an extractivist, export-driven, commodity-fuelled growth regime” (27), signalling, therefore, “a regression to an earlier era when the region’s principal role was a supplier of raw materials to the core world system” (285)—what James Cypher (2010) has called the “path dependent reversion” of the economies of the region.

Part 2 focuses on Central America, with two in-depth chapters on Honduras and Guatemala and a third chapter that offers a broader survey of the rest of the isthmus. Part 3 turns to the Andes, with chapters covering Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Each of these national case study chapters follows the same format. The authors begin with an introductory review of the historical foundations of the country’s social formation and political economic transformation in the neoliberal era. The heart of the chapter is then devoted to an extended description of the multifaceted components of Canadian foreign policy targeted toward the reproduction of the conditions for capital accumulation. Finally, the ebbs and flows of organized popular rejection and struggles against Canadian capital are explored. Part 4 concludes the book with a synthesis chapter.

Gordon and Webber are to be highly commended for challenging and discrediting the image sold to most Canadians of an enlightened country promoting democratic governance, human rights, shared prosperity, and environmental stewardship around the world. Future research might explore how the continuing machinations and depredations of global extractivism might provoke the transnationalization of antimining struggles in general and North-South alliances challenging the Canadian state and Canadian extractive capital in particular. Whether the prospects for bringing about a new foreign policy centered on more inclusive forms of development in Latin America and elsewhere in the Global South are better now under Justin Trudeau remains a moot point (20, 142).