Oh, Canada!

Canadians are supposed to be the good guys in the story. Well, not anymore.

Sojourners - May 2015
by Emilie Teresa Smith

DOÑA DIODORA STANDS on the side of the mountain, shivering. She’s tending to her skinny cows. A simple adobe hut stands here on the edge of her land in the Guatemalan highlands—“so I can stay and look after the animals,” she says. “But I don’t know what I am going to do about water. They’ve taken away the water.”

Tears drip down out of her good eye. She dries them on a thin sleeve. The other eye socket, shattered where the bullet went through, seeps with yellow pus. “Me siento un poco triste—a little sad,” she explains in her halting, quiet Spanish. It is cold on the mountain, achingly so. And, mysteriously, the water has gone: Old streams and wells are dusty. The cows look ill.

Photo Source:  Sojourners Magazine

Just down the crumbling mountain, the tailings pond from the Marlin mine glows a weird shade of neon green.

I first heard about the Marlin mine—operated by Vancouver’s Goldcorp—in 2005, before it opened. That year I was going to Guatemala with a youth group from my diocese, and we were warned: Don’t wear anything that identifies you as Canadians. What? Canadians? We’re supposed to be the good guys in the story. Well, not anymore.

The great global economic shift in the mid-1990s, a free-for-all (if you were already rich) of unbridled neo-liberal capitalism, unleashed an invigorated predatory wave of miners—from Canada—all around the planet to sniff out new places to dig. Canada is the place to raise venture mining capital—the heaps of cash needed to fund these monstrously expensive projects.

Canada has few laws or functioning regulations to control investments or protect human rights and the environment far from our shores. Thus it’s not surprising that 75 percent of international mining companies are registered in Canada and 60 percent are listed on Canadian stock exchanges. In Latin America alone there are around 1,500 mining projects, involving 230 Canadian companies.

Mining Watch, Canada’s top mining observer, has documented that 90 of these companies are involved in 200 conflicts. The main points of contention are water contamination and drastic depletion, land expropriation and devastation, and the lack of community consultation.

Local populations have massively rejected these exploitative practices. They have seen it all before: Promises of jobs, money, and progress, followed by the realities of shattered lives and never-cleaned-up toxic waste. Doña Diodora was shot by midnight strangers at her door, after she openly resisted the Marlin mine for more than five years, refusing to sell her land and refusing to shut up.

I have seen these often-deadly clashes in the flesh—in Guatemala, where I have lived off and on for many years, and then up and down the spine of Latin America. In 2012, I was elected co-president of a historic network of liberation theologians and practitioners that formed in the aftermath of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. In that capacity I have visited El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In each country, as I stepped off the plane, community leaders came to me wanting to talk about the conflicts around Canadian mining in their country. Walls sprayed with graffiti presented me time and again with the unhappy message: “Mineras canadienses—OUT!”

Providing shelter for industry
Meanwhile, back in Canada, there have been numerous attempts to create control mechanisms for mining behavior. They have all met with obfuscation and obstruction. In 2009, a private members bill (Bill C 300, for Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining in Developing Countries) was brought to the Canadian parliament. Mining companies rushed to fund and organize some of the most intense lobbying ever seen in Ottawa. The bill was defeated.

The government of Canada, especially under the nine-year reign of ultraconservative Stephen Harper, has dedicated itself to the promotion of mining companies around the world. While community, environmental, and religious groups have rallied on every front, both in Canada and in the ravaged countries where the mines are going in, the Canadian government has showered resources—diplomatic, legal, and economic—to shelter industry.

The only government response to growing demands for mandatory controls on mining companies has been the creation of a toothless Office of the Extractive Sector Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Counsellor. The office, set up “to assist stakeholders in the resolution of CSR issues pertaining to the activities of Canadian extractive sector companies abroad,” has seen four cases in the five years since its creation—and not a single conflict has been resolved, not even remotely. The complaint and review process is completely voluntary on the part of industry; in all of the cases brought forward, the company has simply refused to participate. The Counsellor office has operated as a screen to greenwash the hopelessly destructive practice of modern mining.

Canadian nongovernmental organizations pushing to hold mining companies accountable (such as the Catholic group Development and Peace and the ecumenical Kairos Canada) have had their government funding slashed. Other NGOs (such as World Vision-Canada and Plan Canada) have accepted more than $6.5 million—of Canadian taxpayers’ money—to in effect run the companies’ CSR programs and, in the process, help to pacify local resistance movements around the world.

Most Canadian citizens are blithely unaware of what is happening in our name. We have bought into the idea that what is wrong in the world is “underdevelopment,” not rampant greed on the part of an ever-decreasing minority. In the “mercantile cosmology,” where the whole world is for sale and nothing is worth anything if it isn’t marketable, international mining blasts a “win-win” rhetoric that carries the day.

A stroll around Toronto or Vancouver reveals the depth to which mining enterprises—while sabotaging mandatory regulations—have purchased the consent of the Canadian public. In British Columbia, for example, Goldcorp nestles its money and its name into the Vancouver Opera Society, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Aquarium, the Tap Society, Science World, Bard-on-the-Beach, Arts Umbrella, Big Brothers, YMCA, the Nature Trust of British Columbia, the Special Olympics, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Goldcorp Mental Health Centre, every major Vancouver hospital, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia. Community, health, education, and arts institutions—in desperate straits due to drastic funding cutbacks—are anxious to take the money. Goldcorp acts as a “good corporate citizen,” and Canadians nod in agreement.

Another way citizens are enmeshed—often without knowing—in controversial international mining projects is through deep ties between industry and pension plans. The national government Canada Pension Plan, to which every working Canadian makes monthly contributions, is one of the largest group investors in Goldcorp. Trade union, teacher, and other public servant union pension plans are not far behind, holding heavy investments in numerous mining corporations. Even churches have their fingers in this sticky, money-making pie.

Resisting the onslaught
Around the world (see “Canada’s Shameful Exports,” previous page), open—and costly—resistance to massive mining projects has arisen since the beginning of the Canadian invasions. While industry appears to have every advantage on its side, determined individuals and groups have created strategic campaigns in defense of their territories.

In Guatemala, Mayan communities have launched dozens of public consultations, availing themselves of both traditional decision-making models and international agreements. They have vigorously applied Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization’s code on the rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. In more than 85 communities, upwards of 1 million Guatemalan citizens have studied, debated, and finally voted on whether or not to accept extractive industries in their territory. Their resounding answer: No.

There has been a rising tide of organized defense of territory by communities across Canada as well. About 200 miles from where I live, there is a sacred lake, known to the Tsilhqot’in people as Teztan Biny and to English speakers as Fish Lake. It is home to 85,000 rainbow trout. Vancouver-based Taseko Mines crafted a plan to use Teztan Biny as a tailings pond, to hold the dirty water from their proposed “Prosperity Mine.” The Tsilhqot’in people and their supporters were having none of it. They organized a years-long campaign of study and defense and, finally, in February 2014 the project was rejected by the federal minister of the environment.

The resistance of the Tsilhqot’in people was a prophetic act: Six months after the federal decision, the holding wall of the Mount Polley Mine tailings pond—only 82 miles from Teztan Biny—ruptured. In the biggest mine spill in Canadian history, waste water and toxic sludge burst out, destroying Hazeltine Creek and pouring into the deep, pristine Lake Quesnel.

It isn’t surprising that the struggle to protect the earth has been taken up by Indigenous communities and others who live close to the soil—and the cycle of creation, growth, and decay upon which it depends. Motivated by a deep love for the land, these communities have supplied a critical challenge to the dominant story that progress and right-living necessarily depend on the destruction of creation.

Theirs is a loud proclamation of a different truth: The Earth is not a thing to be bought, sold, used, and destroyed. Our eternal connection to the dust is that we are dust. We are not the Creator, but frail creatures, utterly dependent on the care of the Earth, her mountains, her water, streams, and deepness underground. As the psalmist reminds us, the Earth is not ours, but God’s; we live with tender mercy and grace upon her abundant belly. 

Emilie Teresa Smith, an Argentine-Canadian Anglican priest, is co-president of the Oscar Romero International Network in Solidarity with the Peoples of Latin America. She is working on a book about Canadian mining companies in Guatemala.

- Submitted by Gareth