Canada’s Role in the Global Political Economy of Critical Minerals: A Critical Approach to Geopolitics, Resource-making, and Statecraft

Abstract

Access to critical minerals is increasingly a point of discussion and action with respect to low-carbon energy transitions and national security priorities (IRENA 2024). This research critically investigates how Canada is positioning itself within an evolving global political economy as a preferred partner and choice supplier of critical minerals through provincial, territorial, and federal strategies. I employ conceptual understandings of resource-making, constituted by discursive and representational techniques (Li 2014), alongside state-making, wherein practices of knowledge production and statecraft enact and render the state coherent (Zhou 2022). Using a methodological approach which combines document analyses and interviews with expert stakeholders, the research identifies intersecting discourses of criticality, urgency, potentiality, security, and responsibility which shape resource becoming and state-making processes (Valdivia et al. 2022). Situated at the productive intersection of critical resource geographies and critical geopolitics, I demonstrate the value of examining Canadian critical mineral strategies through a ‘more-than-mining approach’. Rather than just extraction making possible minerals’ ‘work in the world’, certain resources are constructed as ‘critical’, valuable, and useful through spatio-temporally specific appraisals. A second facet of the framing is its illumination of alternatives along supply chains. Through critical analyses of domestic and extra-territorial initiatives of statecraft, I argue that different ways of knowing and interacting with resources can be made possible. Significant contributions are therefore made by delineating the intersections of derisking and Indigenous communities’ economic participation in critical mineral projects, and resource diplomacy activities where bilateral partnerships support innovations to develop circular economies for critical mineral supply chains. I thus extend the value of critical approaches to statecraft, geological and economic potential, and discourses of security and responsibility as geopolitical concerns which shape how Canada positions itself as a “global supplier of choice” and a “leading mining nation” (NRCan 2022; Mines Canada 2020).