Extracting profit, exporting harm : Canadian mining and the capitalist state in Ecuador

Abstract

1 online resource (49 pages)Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 37-49).This paper offers a reappraisal of the role of the Canadian state in the contentious practices of Canadian mining operations abroad. In seeking to account for these operations, most nongovernmental institutions and industry representatives have focused on the direct actions of Canadian mining companies and their well-documented socio-environmental transgressions. The result has been a dominant consensus that attributes the socio-environmental harm caused by Canadian mining operations abroad predominantly to corporate actors, overlooking the active role of the Canadian state. As an alternative to this consensus, this paper argues that while Canadian mining companies overtly engage in exploitative practices abroad, the Canadian state plays a central and active role in facilitating these activities and, more specifically, functions as an executive committee for the mining industry, actively creating, managing, and legitimizing the conditions for its destructive operations abroad. Drawing specifically on the case of Ecuador and Marxist theories of the state, it argues that the Canadian state, in its role as an executive committee, is a driving force in these extractive operations—typically portrayed as primarily corporate-driven—and proposes greater attention to be paid to the geopolitical actions of the Canadian state, and its structural role as an executive committee in advancing the expansion of Canadian mining operations abroad