Shilling for Canadian Mining

It just seems - well, unseemly.  That a prime minister should address an international audience of business leaders during a weekend meeting of world leaders, and focus primarily on natural resources extraction.  An important issue to be sure, since a country's natural resources can mean the difference between its ability to employ its population and export valuable resource commodities to enrich the coffers of the state to enable it to provide social services to its population.

"Resource development has vast power to change the way a nation lives", Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, speaking to senior business executives in Cartagena, Colombia.  Colombia, needless to say, has been busy for quite a while exporting another kind of resource entirely, through its drug cartels, enriching the criminals who push drugs, but not so much the financial affairs of the country and its people, through trickle-down.

This is not an issue of Colombia's choosing, needless to say, but of violent greed and opportunistic issues relating to the criminalization of that resource, and its scarcity on the black market, and the huge profits to be made by ruining peoples' lives through the certainty of drug dependence and body breakdown.  Like most other countries plagued by illegal drug trafficking and the addictive properties of the forbidden, it is a plague on the country.

Their frantic attempts at battling the drug cartels and making an impact on drug availability has itself bred a culture of violence and terror, leading the countries where it is most seen as a disaster, to suggest attempting a different tack; de-criminalization.  A prospect that seems frighteningly fraught with danger to those countries who haven't had to face the desperation of Columbia, attempting to cope with its drug-infested criminal element, and Mexico, whose more latter very public drug massacres have become legend.

Yet here is the prime minister of Canada, lauding the beneficial effects of mining, the extraction from the Earth of countries' fortunes in natural resources.  Self-congratulating Canada as presenting a business environment of low-tax regime and one boasting environmental regulations that aid the Canadian economy.  Holding out that image as one that could be used as a prime example of entrepreneurial success in managing resources.  While it does make sense, it also makes him seem like a shill for the mining industry.

Needless to say, no one would welcome the alternative; the countries plagued with drug wars and corruption and violence, holding themselves out as exemplars of entrepreneurial prowess.  But at least his performance as Canada's elite business leader posing as its executive political administrator, is nowhere near as downright dysfunctional as the United States' presidential delegation having to recall dozens of Secret Service agents present for the express purpose of protecting President Barack Obama.

During those periods of time, presumably, when they weren't too busy entertaining seductive young Colombian ladies-of-the-night in their hotel rooms. 

Canadian mining operations are well established as world leaders.  They are efficient, well organized, professional and represent themselves in agreements with some quite shady governments, sometimes to the detriment of the indigenous people among whom the mining operations are seen as injurious to their country's environment, and not entirely helpful to the nation's economy as a result of endemic corruption.

Should the Canadian mining industry be somewhat more intelligently discriminating about whom they do deals with, and in launching environmental studies, and in working in tandem with local communities who are the ones who are impacted upon, often deleteriously, by their operations?  Should the Government of Canada have certain standards they would require these mining operations to uphold to ensure Canada's good reputation?

In his speech, Prime Minister Harper emphasized the importance of the industry to Canada; a contribution of $50-billion to its GDP in 2011, the provision of over 300,000 well-paid jobs for Canadians.  "We are already the world's number 1 potash producer, second for uranium and a major global producer of most mineral and energy products", he lectured.  Mining holds close to $200-billion in assets worldwide for Canada.

"Looking to the future, we see increased Canadian mining investment throughout the Americas - something that will be good for our mutual prosperity and is therefore a priority of our government.  We are prepared to share our expertise in this area."  And when mentioning regulatory controls, the Prime Minister claimed the Canadian mining industry to give cause for the country to be "justly proud", "for its elevated sense of social responsibility".

These are assurances that sound good, and we can only hope and trust that this is a real and true representation of how it behaves abroad.  From what ordinary Canadians have read, however, this is not necessarily always so.  Canadian mining operations abroad seem to have earned a polarized reputation, acknowledged for their productive technologies, and for their seeming rapaciousness as well.