Before and after Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address on US television, an advertisement was played that opposed the Keystone XL pipeline. It did not highlight the ways in which this project endangers ecosystems, dispossesses Indigenous people, and intensifies climate change. Instead, it opposed the pipeline because of ties between the tar sands industry and China. After alluding to partnerships between the Canadian and Chinese governments, the advertisement focused on Chinese tar sands investments. The ad suggested that “they” want the Keystone XL project to send tar sands “to foreign countries like theirs.” This particular ad was paid for by the NextGen Climate Group, a foundation that was established and directed by a billionaire.1 Although the ad should not be viewed as a product of the movement against the tar sands, there are grounds to worry that its xenophobic and anti-Chinese sentiments might have resonated with some environmentalists.
This same framework sometimes has been part of campaigns against new and expanded pipelines in British Columbia, where campaigners have regularly referred to tar sands being shipped to China and Asian markets via the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines. In these campaigns, suggestions that “China wants Canada’s oil” or “China is taking over the world” not only miss the opportunity to present a more sophisticated analysis of both the goals of governments and the harms that fossil fuel and petrochemical industries bring to communities in both places—they also foster racist anti-Asian attitudes. Any influence of these dangerous ideas within the environmental movement must be exposed and challenged.
In this chapter, I focus on Canadian responses to Chinese investments in the tar sands, and in the Canadian economy more broadly, to illustrate some of the dangers of accepting xenophobic attitudes in our campaigns. This chapter focuses on international trade agreements that protect investments in extractive industries because it is crucial to address these agreements in campaigns around the tar sands.
The Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) negotiated with China is one of the latest in a long line of trade deals pursued by the Canadian state to allow investor-state arbitration in order to bully communities into accepting corporate demands. When these deals go into effect, local community control and environmental regulations will be weakened as international capital investments pour into industrial infrastructure, mining, pipelines, and associated extractive industries. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force in 1994, international trade agreements have protected investments in enterprises in Canada. The transnational investments in Athabasca tar sands operations are major cases in point. Once a mining project has been established, NAFTA ensures that federal and provincial governments in Canada can be sued if restrictions are subsequently applied to companies with US or Mexican investors. The Chapter 11 clause in this agreement provides such protections for investors, and these provisions have only been strengthened in the latest agreements. The Canada-China FIPA is one such agreement that should be addressed. It is important for critics of the tar sands industry to oppose these deals, but the basis of this opposition is crucial.
The China-Canada FIPA Deal
As transnational investments drive Athabasca tar sands extraction, there has been an exceptional amount of attention in Canada towards financing from China. For instance, there was a major controversy when China National Offshore Oil Corporation was acquiring Nexen, a Calgary-based oil and gas company.2 Anti-Asian prejudices are sometimes subtle but unmistakable in the heightened concern about Chinese investors and companies in the tar sands. Some of this scrutiny towards China has come from the corporate press, as well as politicians who hope to capitalize on the anxieties of some voters about the perceived “threat” of “foreign” takeover.3 However, the same xenophobia has also been part of campaigns opposing the bilateral negotiations for a FIPA investment agreement between the Canadian and Chinese governments. Environmental NGOs were among the campaigners raising such objections, which were reiterated by the Green Party.4
This strategy was not successful, however. Negotiations for this FIPA deal were concluded in September of 2012, though legal and procedural obstacles have slowed implementation. This opposition has included a legal challenge from Hupacasath First Nation, which was rejected by a federal court in Canada’s legal system in early 2014. Indigenous self-determination should have been a central feature of previous campaigns against the agreement. These campaigns are worth revisiting to address how they often involved a flawed strategy that may have prevented the public from seeing the full picture.
In some campaigning and journalism,5 the claim was made that Canada was “selling out,” or being put up “for sale.” There were suggestions that only China would benefit from this agreement, while Canada would not. The reality is that the Canadian state and corporations, as well as the Chinese state and its corporations, would both benefit from this agreement. Agreements like the FIPA with China can only be understood if the broader politics and economics that surround them are considered. Negotiations for such FIPA agreements have been a key plank of Canadian capitalism and foreign policy for the past several years, and many of these agreements have been brokered already.
In recent years, to name only a few examples, Canada has renewed one of its oldest bilateral trade agreements with Israel, completed a bilateral agreement with Colombia, and pursued an investment agreement with India. In 2013, after four years of negotiations, Canada reached a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the EU. In all of these cases, corporations—both state-run and privately owned—are working together with governments to protect and advance financial investments, while undermining grassroots democracy.
Canada has signed forty FIPAs, and is negotiating another ten. The government has been signing FIPAs since 1991, but a new framework was designed in 2004 that was first used in an agreement with Peru in 2006. At the time, we did not see a major national campaign in Canada opposing this agreement. Canadian corporations, particularly mining companies that have been facing popular opposition from peasant and Indigenous communities throughout Latin America, were the most prominent beneficiaries of the agreement.
Canada established the FIPA model to strengthen the rights of Canadian multinational corporations. The FIPA is a Made in Canada agreement—and not a model proposed and imposed by China. To suggest that the FIPA “does not benefit Canada” misses the mark. With this new agreement, Canadian corporations will be beneficiaries of investment protections for their operations in China, and vice versa. As Maude Barlow has pointed out, this FIPA “will give Canadian corporations investing in China the right to sue the Chinese government if there is an attempt to improve existing human rights, labour or environmental standards.”6 Within Canada, the agreement will also privilege foreign investment the Harper government badly wants to speed up resource projects, while disciplining or rendering harmless fight-backs from Indigenous peoples and other communities, in much the same way the FIPAs have done for Canadian capital abroad. For instance, trade agreements like NAFTA prevent a movement from seeking a moratorium or ban that would provide some room for further mobilizing towards change while extraction is halted. Although lobbying to strengthen or defend policies such as environmental protections is a very limited approach to resistance—even in the absence of such trade agreements—these efforts can be part of much deeper revolutionary movement strategies. Such possibilities are being closed off, in Canada and abroad.
Given that Canada is negotiating and has entered into a range of agreements with a series of national governments, it seems that the agreement with China received greater attention because of Canada’s rarely held role as the potentially more vulnerable state party. Hypocritically, this kind of outrage is largely nonexistent when Canada pursues agreements with some countries of the Global South. When Canada completed a FIPA with Tanzania in early 2012, there were only two news stories, and no public campaigns.7 If the FIPA with China is put into force, it is possible that more capital will flow from China to Canada rather than the other way around, but the fear of losing the relationship of Western domination over the Global South seems, at least in part, to have motivated this frenzied response, rather than a principled analysis and mobilization about the impact of the agreement on people and the environment. As a result, the vulnerabilities of peasants, workers, and Indigenous communities in China have remained absent from these campaigns.
The Broader Context
Even as there has been an emphasis on tar sands exports to China, the environmental movement has some awareness of the refining capacity on the West Coast of the US. There has been a grassroots campaign against the Richmond refinery in California, where Chevron has refined tar sands.8 The Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline also delivers bitumen south of the border to Washington State. It seems that the real goal of these pipeline projects is to get tar sands oil to international waters, where an international bidding process will drive up their price. And while the Chinese government is certainly attempting to secure energy supplies by investing in the tar sands, the list of profiteers extracting bitumen is full of the names of US, Canadian, and European corporations, like Suncor/PetroCanada, Syncrude, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil, TOTAL, and ExxonMobil, that receive Western state support. All of these companies are driving tar sands projects.
China, Canada, and much of the rest of the world are in the grip of market fundamentalism—the promotion of economic growth, and the relentless pursuit of profits. This has led corporations to secure ideal investment climates by any means necessary. When the Free Trade Area of the Americas was defeated, national governments pursued bilateral trade agreements on behalf of their corporate sponsors. And when bilateral agreements were not enough, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been established, where corporations write their own labour laws, environmental regulations, and taxation regimes.
The proliferation of SEZs and more conventional corporate land grabs in China has resulted in popular uprisings. In 2010, there were an estimated 180,000 mass incidents—that is, protests, riots, and group petitioning.9 In 2011, farmers in Guangdong province protested for months due to land disputes and government land confiscations. Entering a FIPA with Canada will provide one more instrument for multinational corporations to grab land from under the feet of farmers in China.
These efforts are receiving legislative support from the Chinese and Canadian governments—while providing minimal support to people, and making everything available to multinational corporations. Everything must be commodified. Everything is for sale.
It is a shame that a majority of opposing voices in previous campaigns have chosen to homogenize China and the Chinese as convenient bogeymen. This is somewhat similar to how the campaign against NAFTA was led in Canada, which was portrayed by many critics as the victim and a “colony” of the US, and the US was the bully. This messaging masked the fact that both states are imperial powers and products of colonialism.10 However, a lively anti-globalization movement eventually reframed these debates to identify the real victims and beneficiaries of international trade and investment agreements: multinational corporations benefit from agreements signed by politicians, who then impose these investment and trade regimes onto communities without their consent. The Canada-China agreement is no different.
Racist attitudes factor into trade instruments that guarantee exploitative labour for corporations. Migrant worker programs and outsourcing rely on the construction of “competing” workforces, based on racial and national identities, to provide the social license to justify dramatically lower wages and horrific working conditions for the “foreign worker.” The lives of two Chinese migrant workers who died working in the tar sands in 2007 serve as a stark reminder of how the demonization of people of colour and other nationalities assists in creating brutally unsafe working environments that would be deemed unsuitable for Canadian workers. With the economic recession and a documented rise in white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations throughout the West, any legitimacy given to these polarizing attitudes is extremely worrying. It seems that market fundamentalism and extreme racism have been making inroads together.
How should we understand statements about how Canada is for sale? Public institutions, such as the health care system and water infrastructure, are threatened with privatization; international investors want in. While people resist the dictates of global finance to privatize the public, we must also recognize that the establishment of the Canadian state itself is based on one of the largest acts of violence and land grabs. As Indigenous lands were settled, a legal regime of Crown and private property was established, and Indigenous people were killed and displaced in order to sell land and natural resources to the highest bidder. This model of imposition and exploitation has been used by Canada since long before the first investment agreement was ever established. Centuries ago, furs and cod were the major commodities sought in these lands. Even before Canada was officially founded, it was always in the business of taking and selling off Indigenous lands. Now there are just different buyers. A campaign suggesting that Stephen Harper is suddenly “selling Canada” to China hides this history.
The links between modern free trade agreements, North American fossil fuel export pipelines, and the history of colonization must be made visible. Some of this analysis can be found in a publication entitled Colonization Redux: New Agreements, Old Games, which argues that “while some may see the bewildering proliferation of bilateral FTAs (Free Trade Agreements) and BITs (Bilateral Investment Treaties) throughout the world as a relatively new phenomenon,” in fact this mania “has deep roots,” which “lie in a long history of colonial exploitation, capitalism and imperialism. The classic colonial state was structured for the exploitation and extraction of resources.”11
An Alternative Approach
Considering the limitations of previous campaigns against the FIPA with China can help us to achieve more effective analysis and resistance in the future. We need an alternative approach to these campaigns around transnational investments. Of course, messages about defending “Canada” from “China” have had campaign traction. But, strategically and tactically speaking, choosing a more limited but convenient analysis may also limit the effectiveness of the campaign. In 2000, labour activists Kent Wong and Elaine Bernard raised principled and tactical concerns about a US labour-led campaign against China’s attempt to gain “permanent normal” trade relations status. They wrote: “While the campaign was launched with the intent of promoting internationalism and avoiding China-bashing, we fear that the ultimate impact of the campaign has been to fuel cold war politics, encourage an unholy alliance with the right wing, and has resulted in racially offensive messages. As well, the campaign has weakened the strong anti-corporate and international solidarity focus coming out of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle.”12 A more principled and effective path that avoids the reinforcement of racist attitudes and the complete invisibilization of colonial history is possible.
Like the history of nations, the history of people’s movements shapes our present reality. Many committed organizers have struggled for years to reorient the impulse to “protect Canada” towards building solidarity between communities affected by FTAs around the world. The proliferation of this work has created diverse movements united all over the globe—especially those led by rural, Indigenous, and peasant communities. These movements recognize how legal, trade, and investment regimes are used to divide, rule, exploit, and oppress communities.
A way to begin articulating an alternative approach is to speak about defending communities and the land, rather than defending Canada. We must reject anti-Chinese racism, and affirm Aboriginal title and Indigenous self-determination, without casting Canada as a helpless victim. But the 1 per cent—the elites, and their political friends—tell us that investment is good for Canada, for Canadian interests, for Canadian jobs, and for the Canadian economy. If the goal is to protect communities and lands across Canada, we need to play from a different script.
The argument that “we will lose popular support if we are too radical” is circular and self-fulfilling. Anti-Asian racism may mobilize people if it continues to be promoted—while Indigenous solidarity and other crucial bases for resistance may not mobilize people until these are actively prioritized. Just as the movements against tar sands and fracking have sometimes rallied alongside Indigenous communities and prioritized Indigenous voices, trade justice campaigns should be building genuine solidarity—locally and globally—to strengthen community power.
The goals of a movement that rejects trade agreements that support transnational investment in the tar sands should be: no government should have the capacity to promise investment certainty or security to international capital, because people’s uprisings will continue to create uncertainty for elites; governments may sign agreements and issue permits, but the people will remain in the way; and we will organize in solidarity with directly affected frontline communities both locally and globally to support another 180,000 mass incidents of resistance.