Jurisdiction and the Trans Mountain Pipeline: A study of the co-constitution of public and private power in Canada

Shiri will present current work on the TransMountain Pipeline arguing that, despite the association of socialism with state nationalization, Canada’s bid to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline was less a move to redistribute a private resource to the public sphere, and more a bid to underwrite capital with public funds. Tienhaaara and Walker have called this gamble “neo-liberal nationalization.” In addition to financial resources, though, Canada was also able to de-risk the pipeline via ownership because it shifted corporate governance to the federal government, usurping provincial jurisdiction, and controlling Indigenous assertions of territorial authority.

By renegotiating the political and financial jurisdiction governing the Trans Mountain pipeline, Canada worked to resolve tensions between its infrastructural power and the mobile capital of corporations, which can pick and choose which national infrastructure to access. These logics are often understood as opposite forces of power that animate the world system of accumulation. Therefore, the Trans Mountain pipeline gives us a golden opportunity to examine the way companies and states threaten each other’s power within an interdependent relationship. But also how these tensions are resolved through negotiations over the line demarcating public and private spheres.

Speaker: Shiri Pasternak

Shiri Pasternak is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. She holds a PhD in Planning and Geography from the University of Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which is about the Algonquins’ rejection of the federal land claim policy from the perspective of Indigenous law and jurisdiction. She is the co-founder and former Research Director for the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led think tank based in the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University.