Canada’s Dark Colonial Heart is Now on Fire
The country's settler-colonial project is not just responsible for the graves of the past but has laid the foundations for its bloody future.
Note: This article was originally published for the online Czech magazine a2larm.cz in the Czech language. The intended audience, therefore, is not Canadians. Nonetheless, many people from my home state may find this interesting, and I welcome all feedback and comments.
As Canada celebrates its founding this week, one thing is becoming clear — its past is catching up with it, fast. The country is being forced to contend not only with the horrors it has perpetrated — genocide, colonialism, ecocide, neoliberalism — but also the consequences this past will have on its future, toppling its founding myths, just like its statues, one after the other.
For weeks now stories about the unearthing of mass graves of indigenous children have been traversing the world, laying bare Canada’s dark colonial heart. And yet, before that conversation could be fully had (finally), the country is now being compelled to confront another terror-filled reality: That same colonial project, with its intense resource exploitation and economic liberalism, has also ‘baked in’ a terrifying future.
Just like its skeletons, this week’s climate catastrophe in western North America is now making the headlines. Temperatures reached almost 50 C in villages resting at latitudes north of 50. While urbanites in Vancouver, British Columbia, found themselves boiling inside a ‘heat dome’, a catchy new frightening term for a slow-moving high-pressure system that acts like a pressure cooker, those living in the province’s interior also braced for what was sure to come — wildfires. The heatwave brought with it over 700,000 lightning strikes within a 15-hour period, 5% of Canada’s average annual total. Areas around the province were found to have an ignition likelihood of 100%, and each strike is a potential ignition source. Indeed, only a few days earlier, the town of Lytton had recorded the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada; now it is in ashes.
The residents had no warning. The heat-driven winds were so fast that the fire took the authorities completely off guard, leaving most of its inhabitants with just minutes to flee. Others did not fare as well, doing what they could to take cover only to be burned alive. Canada’s military is now joining the fire-fighting response. Over a hundred fires burn across the province currently, and it is weeks before the fire season normally hits its peak. The next Lytton could be any day now.
But fire isn’t the only worry. In Pemberton, the town did get an evacuation order, but not because of fires, but floods. The heat dome was melting mountain snow and glacier ice so fast that rivers were close to overflow. Back in the city, residents in Vancouver were dying in unprecedented numbers, rapidly overwhelming a hospital system already stretched thin due to COVID. Stories quickly emerged of people waiting up to eleven hours for paramedics to arrive, and emergency numbers like 911 (Canada’s 112 emergency hotline) rendered useless.
And still, the heat dome continues. As I write, its extreme heat is travelling across the prairies, threatening the continent’s vast agricultural land known for growing wheat and producing livestock. This is a land already undergoing extreme drought. Before the current heat wave, water supplies were under threat with rivers drying up and the crops showing stress. Now, it is anyone’s guess as to how the plants and animals will react.
And it isn’t just here in Canada. This is a dryness (and heat) that stretches across the continent. Coast to coast and down to Mexico. California farmers now find it more profitable to sell water than crops. And if rain does come, it will likely be in inconsistent microbursts — as one Canadian meteorologist stated, “It could be raining in your front yard and not in your backyard” — causing extreme flash flooding with hail the size of golf balls, as it did in Calgary later in the week.
The debate in many countries, Canada included, is often whether a particular weather phenomenon can be attributed to anthropogenic global heating. But what exactly are we debating when we suffer from several phenomena at once? This has been the crux of the argument that climate scientists have been trying to make for years. The climate crisis is not a weather phenomenon, it is systemic change bringing about an increased likelihood of weather extremes that trigger more change. This means not one disaster, but many, one causing the other in, what David Wallace-Wells called in The Uninhabitable Earth, climate cascades.
To have watched the news in Canada all week is to see cascades in action, one disaster following another. And yet, we know from climate scientists that these cascades will get worse — much worse — perhaps (and likely) on a global scale as we pass global tipping points. With every part per million more of carbon dioxide we spew into our atmospheric ocean, the suffering will become more horrifying, the cascades will grow larger and even more all-encompassing.
But it is here where I would like to return to the other Canadian story making headlines across the world — the bodies buried in the schoolyards — because I feel this genocide and the climate crisis are intimately related.
As Naomi Klein explained in a recent podcast for The Intercept, the reason behind the industrial genocide of indigenous peoples in Canada was put plainly in our Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, a report roundly ignored by both the Canadian media and the public when it was released in 2015. It said, “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources” (emphasis added).
As a colonial project, Canada has always been about the economic exploitation of land.
This was not just about one culture thinking itself superior to another and imposing its ways through brutality — though it was certainly about that too. Underneath that supremacist logic, it was also all about land. About a fervent drive by European settlers to gain control over lands that were rich with precious metals they wanted to mine, and profitable trees they wanted to fell, and fertile soil they wanted to farm. Lands that, at least in British Columbia, had never been ceded. Lands that in other parts of the country, were covered by treaties that agreed to share the territory with settlers, not surrender it for limitless development and extraction. (Klein, The Intercept, 16 June 2021)
As a settler — an identity I was born into and thus disdain but, nonetheless, feel compelled to accept — the national myth I was given was of a multicultural, peaceful people dedicated to human rights and rooted in a vast, beautiful (and “unpopulated”) landscape for which we were stewards. And this is what accounted for our prosperity. But as the colonial/capitalist project has continued, that myth has become increasingly hard to sustain.
In recent years, Canada has been fraught with conflicts over its resource extractive policies, dominating the political discourse and exacerbating chances at reconciliation with the First Nations (the term used to refer to the 50+ nations and languages of the indigenous peoples). Whether we are speaking about despoiling the largest freshwater reserves in the world, depleting the vast oceanic fisheries, harvesting the last of the old-growth forests, removing the mountain tops of the beautiful Rockies, or building pipelines to support the vast dystopian scrapped earth that is the Alberta tar sands, all of this extraction is a feature of the settler colonialism upon which the country is built, and that is dependent upon enacting genocide.
Aside from those tolls mentioned above, the wealth generated by this extraction (and associated consumerism) has also manifested a historical carbon footprint among the largest in the world. Indeed, on a per capita basis, Canadians still have the largest annual footprint in the G20, with only a few small oil dictatorships in the Middle East surpassing us. These extractive practices have in turn led to an incredible degradation of the land, degrading, too, the ability for ‘nature’ to withstand the climate crisis they are causing.
Our prosperity, much heralded by our elite, has never come without a price or without blood. And now, with the climate crisis, this toll is being enacted on us settlers as well. The fact is the logic of colonialism is at the heart of both our genocidal past and our climate future, with both enveloping our present. These are not two distinct stories, but one appearing in different ways. The consequences of this settler project are now being felt by everyone across the country and are on display for everyone across the world. These consequences prove false the notion of Canadians as stewards of the land. They prove false that we are a nation of peaceful people. They even prove false (beyond the obvious) our beloved image as multiculturalists, for every migrant arriving on our shores becomes part of this disgusting settler-colonial project.
Whether we choose now to own up to our dark past or not, we as Canadians should never be seen the same way again, by others or by ourselves. And perhaps most sadly, no matter the strides the settlers might take now to make amends, we alongside our indigenous brothers and sisters must face our dark hot future together.