7. 12. 2024

Fighting The Latest Forms of Colonial Extraction in Manitoba

Owen Schalk

In the sprawling Manitoba district of Keewatinook – population 18,000, 98 percent of whom are Indigenous – a local resistance movement is challenging the provincial government’s push to extract “critical minerals”: minerals essential to the production of ostensibly green, clean technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) and solar panels. Centred around a sacred camp called Camp Morningstar, this movement’s experience demonstrates the importance of building connections between urban and rural struggles, deepening solidarity between Indigenous people and settlers, and connecting local resistance to global geopolitical issues.

A movement against environmental racism

Camp Morningstar was formed by members of the Hollow Water First Nation in February 2019 to resist a proposed silica sand mine, owned by the Alberta-based mining company Canadian Premium Sand (CPS). Camp members assert that the community was never properly consulted about the project, environmental concerns have not been adequately addressed – especially fears about the airborne spread of silica dust, which can cause the serious lung disease silicosis when inhaled – and treaty rights have been violated, including through the destruction of a trapline near the proposed mine site.

The CPS project, also known as Wanipigow Sand (Wanipigow is the Ojibwe word for Hollow Water), has been controversial since its inception. Camp members told me that Hollow Water’s chief and council approved the mine without the free, prior, and informed consent of community members, and that when consultation did occur, it was a mere “show and tell” by the company. 

The Wanipigow Sand project has taken several forms. First it was a frac sand project; now it’s a glass sand mine. First the company promised more than 100 jobs to community members; now the sand processing plant has been moved two hours south to the city of Selkirk, taking those jobs with it. To Camp Morningstar, any possible benefits from the mine have been continuously diluted, while the environmental risks – deforestation, wild habitat destruction, air quality degradation – remain.

Camp Morningstar is not the only organization in Manitoba that has resisted silica sand mining. In the southern rural municipality of Springfield, the proposed Sio Silica mine provoked worries about soil damage and air quality. Sio also planned to extract the sand from groundwater, raising fears of water drawdown and contamination. A community group called Our Line in the Sand Manitoba (OLS) formed to oppose the project, and when the group’s letters and phone calls to public officials went unanswered, it staged a protest at the site of a CanWhite Sand Corps (later Sio) mine.

In February 2024, the province’s NDP government announced it was “saying no to Sio,” cancelling the southern Manitoba project. Specifically, the government cited the safety risks inherent in Sio’s unproven method of sand extraction from groundwater. Resistance from frontline communities, backed by provincial organizations such as the environmental group Wilderness Committee and Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, likely played a role in the project’s cancellation.

The same month, Premier Kinew said “yes to CPS” – Canadian Premium Sand – effectively greenlighting the Wanipigow Sand project. Manitoba government officials have lavished praise on the project, with Premier Wab Kinew affirming that the mine is “part of our government’s critical mineral strategy and will bring a significant economic benefit to Manitoba while growing our low-carbon economy.”

Camp Morningstar disagrees. Members describe the government’s decision to reject Sio Silica in southern Manitoba, while approving CPS in northern Manitoba, as environmental racism – a racist willingness to take risks with the health of Indigenous populations. As Kateri Philips, a camp member and teacher at Hollow Water First Nation, told me: “The roots of this go back way before Wab and his government. The policies that have been in place for years were used against us.”

Continuities of capitalist extraction

“The Costco of critical minerals”: that’s how former Manitoba premier Heather Stefanson described the province at the unveiling of her government’s critical minerals strategy in July 2023. Of the 31 minerals identified in the federal government’s critical minerals strategy, Manitoba has 29. The province’s goal is to get more mines into production by funding exploration – especially in “remote or under-explored regions” – reducing timelines to approve mines, and evaluating the possibility of switching to a digital claim-staking system similar to Ontario’s Mining Lands Administration System (MLAS).

NDP premier Wab Kinew has continued the Conservatives’ mineral rush, attending the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference in Toronto in March 2024 and pitching Manitoba’s “appeal as an investment destination.” Mining exploration is expanding under his premiership: there are currently four active mines in Manitoba, but 68 projects with mineral resource estimates or exploration permits.

The government’s extractive fervor has provoked resistance at mining and exploration sites across Manitoba, not just at Camp Morningstar. Other projects – the Tanco mine at Bernic Lake, mining in or near the Nopiming and Grass River Provincial Parks – have spurred opposition as well. These mines contain some of the Manitoba government’s most sought-after minerals: lithium, copper, nickel, and silica, all of which are used for EV battery production.

The Tanco mine on the northwest shore of Bernic Lake, owned by Chinese company Sinomine, produces lithium. Sinomine is also interested in extracting cesium, a rare critical mineral used in drilling fluid, from the pillars of an underground mine at the site. The extraction process would require partly draining Bernic Lake to reach the cesium from the surface, with a goal of creating the conditions for open-pit mining. Sagkeeng First Nation, the Manitoba Métis Federation, and Wilderness Committee have all expressed concerns about the ecological impacts of the lake-draining proposal.

The press, however, is more concerned that the mine is Chinese-owned. This fact blares from the headlines when the mine is covered by the CBC and Financial Post, for example. The CBC quotes Christopher Ecclestone, a mining strategist at Hallgarten & Company in London, UK: “Does Canada or the U.S. really want that cesium owned by a foreign outfit?” Readers of such media may be left with the impression that one of the biggest problems in Canadian mining is not the risks posed to human and non-human health or the legislative bias toward extraction, but Chinese ownership of a small number of projects. Yet, in Manitoba and nationwide, many mining projects that pose profound social and ecological dangers are owned by Canadians.

Mineral exploration in provincial parks has increased under the NDP from 659 claims to 681. There is exploration ongoing near Nopiming Provincial Park, the most endangered boreal caribou range in the province; the bulldozing of forest at that provincial park has been reported as recently as April 2024. On top of this, Toronto-based mining company NiCan Limited is exploring inside Grass River Provincial Park, another caribou range. The Kinew government is directly funding NiCan: at PDAC 2024, Manitoba revealed that it had granted $300,000 to NiCan through the Mineral Development Fund. “The most sickening aspect is that the Manitoba government is using our public money to destroy part of this provincial park, where caribou live year round, for corporate profit,” said Eric Reder, a campaigner for the Wilderness Committee.

For the most part, critical minerals strategies offer no detailed plan for how mining projects can move Canada away from climate-damaging energy sources. As Reder writes, “A critical minerals strategy climate document must directly lead us away from fossil fuels. Otherwise, it’s simply a sales brochure for the mining industry or a government hand-out of public money to corporations in a dirty and destructive industry.”

The local frontlines of global power politics

Canadian leaders claim that critical minerals projects will create good-paying jobs while helping Canada transition away from fossil fuels. They neglect to mention that those mining projects frequently harm ecologies, sidestep local consultation, and undermine treaty rights while filling the pockets of powerful mining executives.

They also typically fail to acknowledge that Canada’s critical minerals rush is occurring in the context of US President Joe Biden’s efforts to onshore high-tech production, partly as a hedge against China’s manufacturing might. The Chinese company Sinomine may own one mine in Manitoba, but the province’s minerals strategy is part of a larger project that aims to decrease North American reliance on China by integrating more closely with US mining and technological production.

For example, silica mined from Wanipigow Sand will be trucked two hours south to Selkirk, turned into solar panel glass, then shipped to a solar panel production facility in the US state of Georgia. The government of Manitoba has promoted Wanipigow Sand as a successful example of onshoring: “The project…will appeal directly to countries like the United States that are looking to onshore manufacturing inputs.” Meanwhile, the US military is directly funding mines in Canada to reduce American dependence on China. And as the US and Canada integrate their mineral industries to counter China, the North American allies are also threatening China militarily, including by arming Taiwan to the teeth and sailing warships through the South China Sea.

While Manitoba mines may seem remote from warships in the Taiwan Strait, they are in fact interwoven by the economic and military relationship that binds the Canadian and US capitalist classes together in an imperialist alliance. Solar panels made with silica from northern Manitoba are not manufactured only or primarily for the sake of good-paying jobs or a sustainable transition away from fossil fuels, but also as part of the US military-economic challenge against its main global competitor. In Manitoba, anti-mining groups must work to connect the local and global, linking the need for decolonization at home to the struggle against imperialist policies abroad.

Lessons from the front lines

Strategically, there is much to learn from struggles against critical minerals extraction in Manitoba. Protests and direct action bore fruit in the fight against Sio Silica, but not against the Canadian Premium Sand silica sand mine. Why? Camp Morningstar asserts it is because their struggle is remote from the majority population – they are three hours north of Winnipeg – resulting in limited awareness and support from the provincial capital. In the struggle against Manitoba’s current model of resource extraction, resistance groups must forge north-south and rural-urban connections. Any just future model of mineral exploration will require Indigenous sovereignty, settler solidarity with Indigenous struggles, and Indigenous nations’ substantive free, prior, and informed consent – not superficial consultations that are so often instrumentalized to speed up extraction. These struggles must not rely on our current political parties, as even the ostensibly progressive provincial NDP is enthusiastically continuing the extractive colonial policies of previous governments.

Manitoba’s mining model is colonialist, imperialist, and geared toward the desires of industry rather than the needs of mining-affected communities – and the province’s critical minerals rush is just beginning. As it grows, so must our capacity for organization, direct action, educational initiatives, and inter-struggle cooperation, especially those forms of active solidarity that deepen trust and relationships between frontline Indigenous communities and settlers struggling alongside them.