Canada Kills, Inc.: a critical political economy of health analysis of Canadian mining in Latin America and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

This article applies a critical political economy of health (CPEH) theoretical-analytic framework to the context of Canadian mining in Latin America and the Caribbean, elucidating how a variety of political, economic and social mechanisms operate at multiple levels. Based upon a guided selection of on-the-ground examples, our CPEH analysis demonstrates how the activities of Canadian mining companies, supported by Canadian tax and financial incentives and foreign policy, are linked to adverse health consequences via a series of health-harming pathways. After critically reviewing how the principal extractive governance approaches fail to address health harms, we propose alternative ways of connecting progressive health research and mining resistance.

RESUMEN

Este artículo aplica un marco teórico-analítico de economía política crítica de la salud al contexto de la minería canadiense en América Latina y el Caribe, dilucidando cómo operan una variedad de mecanismos políticos, económicos y sociales a múltiples niveles. Basándose en una selección guiada de ejemplos concretos, nuestro análisis demuestra la forma en que las actividades de las empresas mineras canadienses, apoyadas por los incentivos fiscales y financieros canadienses y de la política exterior, están vinculadas a consecuencias sanitarias adversas a través de una serie de sendas dañinas para la salud. Tras una revisión crítica sobre la incapacidad de los principales métodos de gobernanza extractiva de abordar los daños a la salud, proponemos vías alternativas para vincular la investigación sanitaria progresista con la resistencia a las empresas transnacionales mineras.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical political economy of health
• mining
• corporate impunity
• Canada
• Latin America
• health justice
• extractive industries
• global extractive order
• resistance

PALABRAS CLAVES:

• economía política crítica de la salud
• minería
• impunidad corporativa
• Canadá
• América Latina
• justicia sanitaria
• industrias extractivas
• orden extractivo mundial
• resistencia

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Donald Kingsbury, Daniel Tubb and other members of the Post/Extractivism Working Group, the anonymous reviewers, Ben Brisbois, Erika Arteaga-Cruz, Kléver Calle, and other People’s Health Movement comrades for their fruitful ideas. Funding for earlier phases of this research was provided by the University of Oslo as part of the work of the Independent Panel on Global Governance for Health. The views expressed are exclusively those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to recognize that the extractive order involves not only metal mining and oil and gas exploitation, but also industrial agriculture, sand mining and the “virtual water trade” involving export crops (D’Odorico et al. 2019), among a range of resource-based economic activities that operate on an extractive model. Extraction therefore describes an economic and organizational reality (a “business model”) as well as a physical activity.

2. An exception is Granizo Riquetti’s (2019) incisive analysis of the health impact of open-air mining in the southern Amazon region of Ecuador.

3. Although this paper focuses on Canadian companies and the Canadian government as a nexus of imperial extractive power in Latin America, LAC governments, elites and locally owned mining companies likewise serve as exploitative, and enabling, forces in this domain (e.g. Aguilar-Støen 2016; Sankey 2018; Vélez-Torres and Ruiz-Torres 2015). Moreover, an overlapping set of forces play out within Canada, generating notable Indigenous resistance (Gouldhawke 2020).

4. Illustrating the global extractive order’s increased complexity, in 2006, INCO was acquired by Brazil’s Vale, now the world’s largest producer of iron ore and nickel. This intensified the long history of hostile relations with INCO’s unionized labor force in northern Ontario.

5. This phrase from the work of Geoffrey Rose is often quoted by epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot, who chaired the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health (2005–2008).

6. The CSR Counsellor was set up as part of Canada’s CSR strategy in 2009 to advise extractive companies on their CSR practices. Although its mandate included resolving disputes, in practice it lacked any consequential enforcement mechanisms: https://www.international.gc.ca/csr_counsellor-conseiller_rse/index.aspx?lang=eng.

7. CIDA functioned as Canada’s bilateral aid agency until 2013, when it was absorbed into Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and International Development (now Global Affairs Canada) as a way of consolidating political control over its operations.

8. See, for example, People’s Health Movement (PHM)-Canada, PHM-Ecuador, Justice and Corporate Accountability Project, Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America (OCMAL), Mining Injustice Solidarity Network (MISN), Pueblo Shuar Arutam (PSHA), Amazon Watch, Indigenous land defenders, Mining Justice Alliance, MiningWatch Canada, No a la Mina, Terra Justa.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne-Emanuelle Birn

Anne-Emanuelle Birn is Professor of Global Development Studies and of Public Health at the University of Toronto, where she served as Canada Research Chair in International Health (2003–2013). Her research explores the history, politics and political economy of global health, with particular interests in Latin American health and social justice movements, children’s health and health rights and philanthro-capitalism. Her books include: Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico (Rochester, 2006), Comrades in Health: US Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home (Rutgers, 2013), Oxford’s Textbook of Global Health (2009; 2017/18), and Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (Duke, 2020). Among other activist involvement, she is a core member of People’s Health Movement-Canada.

Mariajosé Aguilera

Mariajosé Aguilera holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Arts in international development studies and economics from McGill University. She has over seven years of research, editing, project management and communications experience in the academic and non-governmental sector, and has worked in Canada, the United States, Ecuador and Peru. She has contributed to research on Indigenous health in Latin America, the mental health of separated migrant families and the health impact of climate change, environmental degradation and extractive industries. She currently works in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa.

Nikisha S. Khare

Nikisha S. Khare is a family medicine resident at the University of British Columbia. She earned her MD degree at the University of Toronto in 2022, and her master’s degree in public health at the University of Saskatchewan in 2018, where her thesis focused on the dynamics of community resistance against extractivism in Latin America. She has previously worked at the BC First Nations Health Authority, contributing to writing an Indigenous women’s health report. She is a member of several activist groups, including the People’s Health Movement-Canada, working on topics of mining justice and other intersecting issues.

Ted Schrecker

Ted Schrecker is a Canadian political scientist who moved to the UK’s Durham University in 2013, then Newcastle in 2017 and returned to Canada in retirement at the end of 2022. Ted’s research interests focus on the political economy of health inequalities, on multiple scales, as they are affected by neoliberal globalization, and on the politics of the evidence-policy interface. His research has been published in journals including Critical Public Health, Global Public Health, Globalization and Health, Health & Place, Review of International Political Economy, Social Science & Medicine and Sociology Compass. In 2014–2019, he was co-editor of the Journal of Public Health.