Canada exists to put holes in the ground and extract surplus value for shareholders. In this episode, originally recorded in 2021, Team Advantage opens the Canadian trench-coat to find total corporate impunity. We discus how the Canadian state facilitates resource extraction within its borders and around the world at the expense of the common good, then imagine what mining might look like in a better society.

Works Cited:

• Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination – Tyler Shipley

• Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries – Alain Deneault & William Sacher

• Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism – Martín Arboleda

• Canadian Mining in Ecuador series - Brandi Morin

Every century or so the Canadian left gathers at the Royal Canadian Legion #1 in downtown Calgary to inagurate a new era of progress. In 1932 it was J.S. Woodworth and the gang in 1932 at the founding of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (which would become the NDP). On July 13, 2025 it was Team Advantage, Shama Rangwala, André Goulet, Roberta Lexier and Rob Rousseau.

This live recording begins with a discussion of what the Progressive Publics symposium is all about before saying goodbye to the NDP with a brief history. Then the team discusses the possibilities of a socialist project to come. With live heckling from the audience! (Mostly Jeremy Appel.)

Support our podcast! Rhetorical and real threats to Canadian sovereignty pose a tough question to critics of the Canadian state: Do we align with liberal nationalists in defense of the Canadian project or do we remain skeptical?

In this episode Team Advantage traces a brief history of Canadian nationalisms, including earlier attempts at imagining a socialist national project, in order to better understand the current moment of rising nationalist sentiment. We ask if it's even possible to extricate a good Canadian nationalism from the history of colonial land theft and genocide that undergirds this state, revisit the one time Canada was actually cool, and offer trenchant critiques of Canadian civic statuary.

Works Cited

• Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels - Erica Benner
• Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism - George Grant
• Canadian capital and secondary imperialism in Latin America - Todd Gordon and Jeffery Roger Webber
• La tentation québécoise de John F. Kennedy - Jean-François Lisée
• Responding to Donald Trump with a popular democratic project for Canada - Marcel Nelson
• Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada - Kari Polanyi
• Becoming Native in a Foreign Land; Sport, Visual Culture, and Identity in Montreal, 1840-85 - Gillian Poulter
• Mohawk Interruptus - Audra Simpson
• Louis Riel - Thee Headcoats

Related Episodes

• Imagined Alberta: Western Canadian National Fantasies
• The Waffle, the NDP, and Full Breakfast Socialism