Review
“A powerful indictment of Canada’s role as a platform for mining firms engaged in highly exploitative and polluting activities in far-flung corners of the global South … and closer to home. A call for much tighter regulation of the Canadian mining industry and for ethical and responsible investment as an alternative model for the future. The publication of this book represents a blow for freedom of expression against the abusive use of SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) lawsuits by Canadian corporations.”
– Philip Resnick, University of British Columbia Department of Political Science
“Through well-documented detail, Alain Deneault and William Sacher show how a permissive domestic policy and regulatory regime and an extreme level of investment speculation combine to allow some Canada-based mining companies to behave deplorably around the world. At a time when the Harper government is rolling back key environmental laws to accelerate resource development in Canada, Deneault’s and Sacher’s hard-hitting analysis and tone beg a timely question: if Canadians want to export—not bad—but exemplary corporate behaviour to the rest of the world, what standards must we hold our mining companies to here at home?”
– Ed Whittingham, Pembina Institute
“… well-researched look at one of the many complex problems posed by global capitalism. Further, the mining industry is a particularly useful lens through which to view these broader problems in that mining is, with agriculture, literally the foundation for the rest of the real economy. – Saskatchewan Law Review
“Through well-documented detail, Alain Deneault and William Sacher show how a permissive domestic policy and regulatory regime and an extreme level of investment speculation combine to allow some Canada-based mining companies to behave deplorably around the world...."– Ed Whittingham, Pembina Institute
“There are two – or more – sides to most every argument and, by delving into the pages of Imperial Canada Inc., those affected by mining (which essentially is everyone) will gain valuable insight into this giant industry and its impacts around the world.”
—canadianminingmagazine.com
About the Author
Alain Deneault was born in the Outaouais region of Quebec. He completed a research-doctorate at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and the Université de Paris 8, at which he received his PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Jacques Rancière. His interests lie in nineteenth-century German and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as the work of Georg Simmel. In 1999, as a member of the Cross-Canada Caravan, which included organizations such as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Council of Canadians, Deneault visited many Canadian cities before attending the Millennium Round of the World Trade Organization Conference in Seattle where he spoke at sessions on globalization and the WTO. Deneault’s research and writing practices are diverse and often collaborative, focusing on how international financial and legal agreements increasingly foster the interests of “stateless” transnational corporations over those of nation states and the interests of their human communities.
William Sacher has worked throughout Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and has published numerous articles and reports in the national and international press about the exploitation of natural resources and the politics of climate change. He holds a PhD in applied mathematics, specifically for the oceanic and atmospheric sciences, from McGill. He is an independent researcher of the collective Ressources d’Afrique in Montreal, and co-authored the book Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique, a publication which received the 2009 Richard Arès Award in Quebec, Canada.
International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. Anatolia Junction, his acclaimed work on the unacknowledged wars of the Ottoman succession, has been translated in Turkey, where it enjoys a wide following. Shattered Images, which explores the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements in Islam, has also been translated into Turkish, and into French as Images brisées (VLB éditeur, Montréal). After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at the Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic thirty times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and Le Devoir. A three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation, plus a nomination in 2009 for his translation of Thierry Hentsch’s Le temps aboli, Empire of Desire, Reed has translated works by many of Quebec’s leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers. Reed worked with documentarist Jean-Daniel Lafond on two documentary films: Salam Iran, a Persian Letter and American Fugitive. The two later collaborated on Conversations in Tehran (Talonbooks, 2006). Fred A. Reed resides in Montreal.
