“They say you can judge the health of the mining business by the escalators at the Toronto Metro Convention Center during the annual Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention.”  –Steve Fiscor, Engineering and Mining Journal, March 7, 2019. 

  • On February 28th, 2020, the Beyond Extraction Town Hall took place at 401 Richmond in downtown Toronto. Over 100 people were in attendance to listen to the experiences and insights of a distinguished panel whose work continues to inspire and direct all those critical of extractive capitalism.

    Joan Kuyek: Author and Former Co-Founder of MiningWatch Canada
    Nigel Henri Robinson: Youth Engagement Lead, Indigenous Climate Action
    Dr. Shiri Pasternak: Research Director at the Yellowhead Institute
    Dr. Anna Zalik: Associate Professor at York University

  • On February 27, 2020, Ramón M. Balcázar delivered the keynote presentation at the Moving Beyond Extraction Discussion at York University. Ramón is an activist and member of the Observatorio Salares in Chile and a PhD student at the Metropolitan Autonomous University of Mexico. Many thanks to Ramón for allowing the repost of his presentation concerning the challenges and impacts of lithium mining in Chile.

  • Food Beyond Extraction is a food cart that mobilizes foods, written materials and conversations related to the impacts of and resistances to Canadian mining projects in Global South territories. The cuisine highlights foods and ingredients from regions whose land, food and cultural rights are being threatened by Canadian mining projects in the three countries that sponsored PDAC 2020.

  • Download and share “warning signs” prepared for the People Before Profit Rally.

What is PDAC? How do we counter it?

Every March, leading mineral explorers, miners, and service providers gather in Toronto for the meeting of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC). This is the largest such gathering in the world, and it takes place in Toronto for a good reason – nearly 60% of global mining companies are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, making Toronto a global mecca for the mining industry. Across an investor’s exchange, trade show, and conference sessions, PDAC represents a startling aggregation of extractive industry power. At Beyond Extraction, we centre PDAC as the focal point of our efforts to direct critical attention to the inner workings of the extractive industry and its global networks.

Pegged as “the world’s premier mineral exploration and mining convention,” and situated within Canada’s financial and business capital, PDAC works to facilitate the liberation of capital from local regulatory bodies and resistances, promoting extraction as the pinnacle source of economic growth and well-being. Over the course of four days of presentations, investor exchanges, galas, and hockey tournaments, Toronto reveals itself as the extractive capital of the world, the veritable “belly of the beast,” whose tentacles reach far across time and space wreaking havoc in communities and ecologies around the world. The many violences of PDAC’s primary sponsors is well documented and yet the institution itself, its effectiveness as both a legitimizing force and one that further masks and obfuscates the ills of extraction are less discussed. Thus, PDAC offers a critical case study of extractivism and an opportunity to organize, disrupt, and challenge industry while producing a radical series of inquiries and networks into its operations.

The Beyond Extraction Counter-Conference was organized around two central questions: What is PDAC? How do we counter it? Longer versions of these questions include: How do we identify and understand all the PDAC actors, their roles, their reach, the forms of governance they are accountable to, and the responsibilities they elude? What kinds of critical activities – research, protest, art – are required to intervene and stop the human and ecological destruction caused by the activities celebrated at PDAC? 

Beyond Extraction saw PDAC as an opportunity to engage in a multi-day series of events that read, mapped, revealed, and countered extractive corporate-state power. As a concurrent workshop to PDAC, between February 28 and March 4, 2020, BECC acted as a venue for scholarly activities, organizing, training, and a physical base for those working against the global extractivist economy. These events included a Town Hall, a keynote presentation from Ramón M. Balcázar, a Food Beyond Extraction cart, and the People Before Profit Rally.

This work is supported by an International Workshop Award from the Antipode Foundation.