I've always been somewhat ambivalent about Canada's mining industry. For book-keeping and sundry further reasons a lot of international mining companies that aren't really all that Canadian like to make this country their home base.
If you track the track record of these "Canadian" miners, you will be mightily underwhelmed. Mining Watch is a good base from which to track them.
What you'll find is a sordid record of human rights violations; disappearing anti-development activists, indigenous peasants pushed off their land, disappeared journalists who's torsos reappear in different locales than their heads... it goes on and on. Track the human rights record around Canadian mining companies and you will be appalled.
Rarely do these outrages appear in the mainstream media.
But, by God, one outrage has gone a bridge too far.
Nevermind dead mine opponents and disappeared journos. That's the stuff that would never surface in Canadian media.
But a junior mining outfit with a small stake in a potential northern Ontario mining project has hit the headlines with a tongue-in-cheek advert featuring a couple of young women scantily clad...
Oh My God!
That's friggin' sexism!
They're objectifying women! That has utterly and absolutely no place in an industry that routinely makes their opponents in the Global South disappear!
The outrage is near universal... the Canadian Mining Journal, the Mining Association of Canada, the Prospectors and Developers Association... even the blue-bloods at Earnscliffe Strategy Group have united to decry as one the utterly sexist use of bikini-clad women to promote a mining project!
But if it's random dumbfuck environmentalist mine opponents losing their lives in Mali or Peru those same mainstream voices will rarely have a word to say.
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