Extracting Decline: Resource Development and Mobile Labour in Canada

This incisive study traces the hidden costs of Canada’s oil economy and the often-overlooked experiences of its workers who travel thousands of miles from the Maritimes to make a living.  

The oil sands in Alberta are known around the world, but less visible are the workers who sustain the province’s oil and gas industry. Extracting Decline investigates how it became normal for workers to travel thousands of kilometers from Canada’s Maritime region to make a living in the oil field.

Katie Mazer reveals the intimate links between regional underdevelopment and Canada’s extractive economy. In the decades after World War II, the Canadian state identified the Maritimes as a national problem. Framing the region’s rural economies as unviable, policy-makers worked to remake the Maritimes to fit a modern vision of the national economy.

Weaving together welfare and rural development policy, political economy, and workers’ lived experiences, Extracting Decline documents how the devaluation of non-capitalist economies has helped transform land and labor for extraction. While the Maritime region has long been denigrated for its economic failure, Extracting Decline ultimately argues that it holds lessons for imagining a more just and sustainable world.

Katie Mazer is an assistant professor of environmental and sustainability studies and women’s and gender studies at Acadia University. Her work has appeared in both popular and scholarly publications, including the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, The Extractive Industries and Society, and several edited collections. She is from Prince Edward Island and lives in Kentville, Nova Scotia.