Canada is recognized as one of the nation-state with the worst per capita greenhouse gas emissions on record. This is an unfortunate distinction since it is the main index used to document the human impact on climate change. While attempts are made to present the fight against climate change as a responsibility shared equally by everyone, the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions are the result of a handful of multinational corporations whose profits are concentrated in the hands of a very small number of individuals. Yet the government has been slow to act to reduce this footprint and maintains the notion that addressing climate change is a matter of individual choice.
The Canadian state is a political project based on the subjugation of ecosystems and the majority of the population (indigenous peoples, non-white people, women and non-binary people, and even poor white people) to a regime of commercial exploitation of natural resources and wealth accumulation. The current footprint of the Canadian regime on the climate system is not limited to greenhouse gas emissions: it is deeply rooted in its colonial history.
The territorial development of the Canadian state follows a long process of dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples. The ecological and socio-economic transformation of the territory began when the first settlers arrived in North America. This settlement colonialism aimed to support the permanent occupation of the land by an immigrant population of mainly European origin. Far from being a thing of the past, it is continually updated by an infinite number of practices that facilitate access to and commercial exploitation of the territory. Settlement colonialism considers the territory unoccupied and unused until it is commercially exploited. Treaty and non-treaty indigenous territories were all coveted for their rich raw materials by commercial powers and population movements followed the various waves of capitalist expansion.
At the birth of the Canadian state, most of the land came under the ownership of the federal Crown and was then divided up into private property. This new legal regime was in addition to a series of previous actions promoted by the French and British colonial authorities to allow the opening up of agricultural land and the exploitation of furs, timber and the sea. Prior to 1867, indigenous peoples in or near the territory under colonial control were already severely disrupted by European diseases, wars and trade with colonial powers. Since the Constitution Act of 1867, the federal government and the provinces have regulated, funded and supervised the knowledge acquisition about the land and its natural resources for the purpose of wealth accumulation. They oversee the access, exploitation, transportation and processing of resources. The Indian Act of 1876 established a regime of dependence of indigenous peoples on the State and provided a framework for the creation of reserves designed to immobilize indigenous groups within a restricted territory.
The expansion of the Canadian State towards the West at the end of the 19th century was part of this process. State power invested directly in the construction of a railroad to transport settlers and to export resources, divided the territory into private agricultural properties and conducted advertising campaigns in Europe. The colonial state sent the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to “pacify” First Nations and Métis resistance and confine them to reserves. The indigenous populations of the Prairies had to deal with an unceasing flow of settlers occupying their territory and transforming permanently its unique ecosystem. What follows is a constant stream of territorial and cultural dispossession through the subjection of indigenous societies to the dependence of colonial power, through either the privatization of the land, the opening of territories to European colonization, or directly by force. The disappearance of the prairie bison through over-hunting is emblematic of this process, since this species is inseparable from the autonomy and cosmology of the indigenous peoples of this region, whose habitat has been replaced by monocultures intended for export.
Today, the construction of roads, settlements and infrastructure to facilitate the exploitation of natural resources is so relentless that it is easy to forget that it is part of a colonial project. While some indigenous groups are disrupting this “established order” and succeeding in bringing their demands for environmental justice and sovereignty into the public arena, countless attacks on their territories fly under the radar. In Inuit Nunangat, Canadian and foreign mining companies continually disfigure the landscape by leaving exploration waste behind. Their ships crack the ice where seals give birth and their roads segment the caribou’s migration route. Their extractive activities burn appalling amounts of fossil fuels, creating smog far from cities and industrial parks. Further south, the forests of the Anicinapewaki have seen and still see their landscape permanently altered. Fumes from metal smelters blend with the burning of leaded gasoline and record their pollutants in the growth rings of trees. A coniferous forest is dying out as clear-cutting and closure of undeveloped farmland leaves room for commercial tree species. The rivers of Nitassinan and Eeyou Istchee are being irreversibly harnessed one after the other by buying, through jobs and royalties given to the band council, the “free and informed consent” to flood traditional hunting grounds.
Ecosystems and non-commercial ways of inhabiting the land, such as subsistence hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering, are even excluded from any consideration and replaced by numbered lots determined by the market potential of a single resource. The ravages of the industrial model of exploitation of nature are causing locally massive extinction of wildlife, along with soil, water and air pollution. These consequences multiply when we change scale and are mixed with changes related to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the ozone layer. Even today, the so-called economic health of the Canadian state’s regions depends on businesses to sustain and expand resource development, on public support to maintain extractive activities despite their cyclical crises, and on a new recreation and tourism sector based on the commercialization of undeveloped portions of the land.
The application of Canadian legislation to subjugate indigenous peoples is historically inseparable from the project of opening up the territory to natural resource exploitation. The implementation of settlement colonialism has greatly restricted and transformed the territory. The struggle against environmental change requires a questioning of capitalism, along with the privatization of the land for the commercial exploitation of the biosphere. The ways to a sustainable future will not emerge from a “reconciliation” without power sharing or from a “sustainable development” which cannot rhyme with infinite growth. It will emerge from a redistribution of the power, by giving back the power to manage the land, the territory.