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This paper focuses on the contradictory nature and sometimes unintended consequences of workers' efforts to defend particular communities against the ravages of capital restructuring. In the past decade, pattern collective bargaining in the highly unionized British Columbia pulp and paper industry has faced enormous strains due to intense industry restructuring. Our analysis focuses on the repercussions of actions taken by union locals in two British Columbia towns-Port Alice and Port Alberni-to try to secure the survival of their pulp and paper mills and, even in the case of Port Alice, the continued existence of the community. Our analysis resonates with recent debates surrounding worker agency as well as writing in the 1980s which addressed the often contradictory and problematic nature of workers' struggles to 'defend place'; writing largely neglected in more recent work in labour geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to research on the means by which the Canadian state authorises, enables, and secures new major petroleum pipelines. While disruptions to pipeline construction are now increasingly common, state and industry alike have continued to finance and approve new projects, even despite serious and ongoing concerns about impacts on ecologies and Indigenous jurisdiction. The paper focuses on one under‐researched mechanism of state authorisation: federal impact assessments for new oil and gas pipeline projects, undertaken by the National Energy Board (NEB), Canada's now former energy regulator, which operated between 1959 and 2019. The NEB's mandate was to deem, via impact assessment, whether a new project would be in the "public interest". I argue public interest is an effective legal‐political mechanism for securing and obscuring the state's claim to jurisdiction, the traction of which lies partly in an underlying colonial scalar logic and imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how white, rural, working‐class men come to be seen, by employers and themselves, as a "natural fit" for mobile work in resource extraction. Examining mobility between eastern Canada and the Alberta petroleum industry, I trace longstanding racial, geographical, and gendered explanations of these workers as dependent and averse to work. I draw on interviews with employers, employment counsellors, and mobile workers, and media representations to consider how these narratives function to shape and constrain workers' political imaginaries and understandings of themselves. The pervasive story of these workers as undeserving has enabled the emergence of a contrasting working subject: the hard‐working, flexible "east coast" worker who is a natural fit for mobile work in resource extraction. I argue that, despite the challenges of mobile resource work, the interplay of stories that pathologise and celebrate these workers has encouraged their attachment to resource extraction as the pathway to a better life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberal governments embarked on austerity programs that include reducing public services, imposing public sector wage restraint, and reorganizing public sector working conditions and labour relations. In this context of economic crisis and austerity, populism has risen across North America and Europe on both the right and left of the political spectrum. The rise of right populism in particular confronts unions with key organizational and strategic challenges as neoliberal governments seek to mobilize right populist discourses in their efforts to restructure work and labour relations. Using a socio-geographic framework, and based on an examination of post-2008 legislative and policy measures undertaken at the federal, provincial, municipal levels in Canada, this paper explores the nexus between 'uneven austerity', rising populism, and union strategic capacities. We examine this intersection of austerity and populism at multiple scales to reveal the implications for organized labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canadian diamonds are marketed as 'ethical' alternatives to notorious 'blood diamonds'. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethical consumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumption operates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned as moral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in the form of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versus the exploitation of 'dark' Africa, pristine, 'white' northern landscapes, modernization via commodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning within which the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamonds also has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethical consumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Occupy movement catalyzed public debate on the issue of growing income inequality. This paper examines recent patterns of inequality in Canada, paying particular attention to changes in the characteristics of the top 1% of income earners. At the national level, the gap between the top percentile and the other 99% has widened considerably: in 2006, 11% of the nation's income was concentrated in the hands of top earners (whose mean income of $344,000 is 11 times that of the average Canadian) compared with 7.7% just 15 years earlier. Beneath such national-level figures lie important geographical differences in the income hierarchy: the thresholds, average incomes and socio-economic characteristics of the top 1% vary widely across provinces and cities. Among the most important spatial shifts observed is the growing concentration of high-income groups in energy-rich Western Canada, where Calgary has become the most unequal city in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001 a coalition of actors including farm, consumer, health, environmental and industry organizations announced its opposition to Monsanto's attempts to commercialize GM wheat in Canada. Although this coalition consisted mostly of rural and agricultural groups, the three arguments that came to dominate the discourse advanced by the coalition seem, at first glance, to characterize a politics of consumption. These three arguments revolve around market acceptance, environmental risk, and the lack of democratic and transparent process in biotech regulation and policy. This paper argues that producer interests were not displaced by, but rather articulated alongside and through consumer-driven discourses. In fact, farmers used claims about the supremacy of the consumer and impending environmental change to advance their vulnerable political and economic positions as producers of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the racialised political ecologies inscribed by financial investments in a large‐scale corporate farm engaging Indigenous peoples in the Canadian prairies. Established in 2009, One Earth Farms (OEF) became one of Canada's largest farms by leasing First Nations' farmland. I argue that OEF's early success hinged on its promise of "naturalising finance" by engaging agriculture as a purportedly more real and stable financial vehicle relative to traditional assets. Simultaneously, OEF claimed to facilitate First Nations' participation in agriculture by integrating their land and labour with financial flows—effectively "financialising natives". I document the specific opportunities for capital accumulation and valuation mobilised by the project's claims to be providing reparative historical redress to First Nations through investor and corporate ecological and social "responsibility". Reflecting on colonisation and racialisation processes, I demonstrate the ways that Indigenous histories and subjectivities are mobilised and monetised in contemporary political ecological projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]