CONTINENTAL SHIFT (4/4): Extraction North of Empire

In Canada, intensive resource extraction has long been baked into the country’s political economy and, arguably, to nation-building itself. Resource booms and policy choices have opened landscapes and livelihoods to large-scale mining and fossil fuel extraction, producing harms that are inseparable from the country’s colonial history.

Today, as supply chains are restructured around critical minerals and trade regimes are overhauled, Canada faces urgent questions about sovereignty, consent, and justice: can extraction be reimagined in ways that respect Indigenous rights and ecological limits? Or will new geopolitical pressures and rising tensions with countries like the United States simply deepen old harms? 

To explore these questions, we spoke with Jess Dempsey, a professor at UBC, and Jamie Kneen of MiningWatch to get to grips with the state of Canada’s extractive industries. Later, we were joined by Tara Marsden, an independent consultant from the Lax Ganeda (Frog) Clan of the Gitksan peoples, who has spent 30 years advancing sustainable development and operationalizing free, prior and informed consent, and who spoke to us about how the history and shifting terrain of extraction in Canada has been shaped by the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty.

Continental Shift is made possible by support from the Public Scholars Initiative at the University of British Columbia.