Don't breathe the air
Necrocapitalism's hold on Canada's elites
It was easy to laugh at Texas last week, as many liberals did. Their hubris in the face of moving water; water that does not care who is elected and who is on top; water that flows where it flows, without thought for the children who sleep on the flood plain; not thinking at all about how regulations get in the way of profit.
Water flows and Texans — those God-obsessed, Republicans — well, they fucked around and found out is what many people said. What did they think would happen? 129 confirmed dead, 170 missing. Maybe now they’ll wake up.
It’s fun to be smug. Canadians especially love the feeling. It’s easy to be smug when you’re sitting in air conditioning during a heatwave, or breathing in clean air during a forest fire crisis far away from where the winds travel.
But we’d do well to learn from Texas’ example. Not only is Canada far from immune from the deregulatory cowboy libertarianism that sometimes is associated with Texas, we’re actively embracing things like Trump’s DOGE strategy, deregulation and unfettered profiteering. We can look at Texas and be smug, but maybe you don’t want to breathe in too much if you’re in Sasaktoon or Toronto today, where air quality is so bad that it’s on the extreme bad end of the Good to Bad chart.
What kind of society would allow for their children to smoke several packs of smokes per day?
Consider this, from the group World Resources Institue: “Extreme wildfires in Canada accounted for about two thirds (65%) of the fire-driven tree cover loss last year and more than one-quarter (27%) of all tree cover loss globally.”
Texas and Canada have an important thing in common. Texas, with their 31 million people and Canada with our 40 million, play outsized roles in global oil and gas production, sewing the seeds for catastrophic natural disasters, like floods and fires. And in both regions, oil and gas is a source of pride. Yes, that which sews our destruction is still a source of pride.
Pride, mostly, because they make shareholders a lot of money and money talks (or, money buys). In 2024, TC Energy made $4.4 billion, Suncor made $6 billion, Imperial Oil made $4.7 billion Canadian Natural Resources had record-breaking production.
Undeterred by forest fires or record-breaking heatwaves or entire Indigenous communities needing to be evacuated hundreds of kilometres away, our federal government has decided to promise even more pipelines, more oil production and more profits for the industry. Hubris upon hubris upon hubris while Canada burns.
Canada’s economy worships at the altar of death. Necrocapitalism is pouring public resources into new energy corridors when we have what we need already, and the technology is there to replace the dirty fuels of the past. It’s chasing the policies of death while we know full well that they will kill people. It’s ignoring true nation-building projects while telling Canadians that their salvation is brought to them by the letters L, N and G.
Of course, it isn’t confined just to oil and gas. Necrocapitalism is also profiting off of the residents of long-term care facilities and calling those stocks, “A top pick in the hottest REIT sector” as the Globe and Mail did this morning. It’s privizing our public services, criminalizing people who have nowhere to live, murdering people through a toxic drug crisis — it goes on and on and on and it’s increasingly woven throughout everything that our governments do. Hubris upon hubris upon hubris.
Maybe it’s the heat talking (I do not have AC) but it seems to me that it would be reasonable to imagine then, how the politics of death can be used against those who harm us for profit. We cannot fight necrocapitalism with necrosocialism but the politics of death and destruction should not only be weilded by those who have power …
And then you say, but wait, Nora, this is why they’re massively expanding the state security apparatus in Canada. We cannot say such things. We can’t even dare to think them.
I had a tiny bit of hope that Carney might let his human instincts override his economist instincts. I was wrong. He is a disaster. Probably pretty much the same as Poilevre would be in his position.
So comrades come rally, let each sweat in their place; the international working class must fight this great disgrace...