Avi Lewis at a campaign event in Toronto, March 5, 2026. Photo courtesy Avi Lewis/Facebook.

It was a few weeks before Christmas at our mountainside drill camp in north-central British Columbia, many hundreds of kilometres from any human settlement. The project is about as far north again from the province’s “northern capital,” Prince George, as Prince George is from the actual capital, Victoria. The only ways in are either by a vomit-comet of a bush plane landing on an overgrown airstrip or, when the weather’s not being sufficiently cooperative for flying, a nine-hour drive along a dirt-track resource road.

There’s a romance to working so remotely from civilization, an awe at and humility before the cyclopean processes of deep time that produced the objects of our geological pursuit, and a pride in being the men and women whose mining labours—a craft older even than agriculture—hold up all the rest of modernity.

You’re there for weeks at a time, working 12 hours a day minimum, and for seven days a week. There are no weekends in the bush. It’s not unusual to work 21, or even 42 days straight with no break, if that’s what’s needed. You go home for a couple of weeks or just ten days and then it’s right back at it.

As Robert Service’s storied prospector Sam McGee knew well, there is a harshness to the northern winter—a particular and terrible cold. “Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.” Yet perhaps those rough conditions and ever-present risks—like those faced by the painter on a suspension bridge or the underwater welder repairing a cargo ship’s hull—only deepen the romance and sharpen the pride that come with such work.

The temperature at camp had been loitering close to -30C for days, and even when the crummy propane heater in the core-shack was (mostly) working, we still dressed triple- or quadruple-layered, giving even the skinniest of us the paunch of the Michelin Man.

One day, this blasted heater seemed to have gone on an indefinite wildcat strike. Inconveniently, a polar vortex would also soon be gracing our prospect with a visitation. The forecast for the coming days threatened a drop below -40C, with a brief few hours even predicted to hit an inhuman -46C. I use the word “inhuman” here both literally and advisedly, for -40C is pretty much the edge of the design envelope for most ordinary, non-ruggedized equipment and habitats, and, well, humans. Fuel waxes and gels. Helicopters won’t fly. When hit, steel now shatters rather than deforms. Frost bites unprotected skin in just one or two minutes, meaning if anything breaks down, it’s a really bad idea for anyone to go outside to fix it.

The camp manager was getting anxious. Over the course of his career, he’d handled the occasional brief dip below -40C. You just hunker down in the ATCO cabins for a few hours, keeping operations to a minimum until things warm up. But he’d never experienced this type of cold. Luckily the forecast was off. In the end, at his worst, Jack Frost only delivered minus forty-one, and just for a short while. Later on, a Rube Goldberg contraption of a fix for the core-shack heater was kludged together that involved using a diesel heater to warm up the propane—a comically carbon-intensive combustion of one fossil fuel to be able to combust another one.

I had re-trained and gotten into this business after a career as a science journalist in part because I wanted to do something practical about climate change instead of just writing about it, to explore for minerals needed for the clean transition like copper or lithium. And so, I had to laugh. There are indeed strange things done, midnight sun or or otherwise, by those who moil for gold and other critical minerals. But, like toasty old McGee in the heart of his furnace roar, wearing his smile you could see a mile, I was also just happy to be warm again.

It was around this same time, far down south, that Avi Lewis, a top contender to head the federal New Democratic Party, was busy attacking Prime Minister Mark Carney’s resource and infrastructure project plans during a leadership debate. His nation-building scheme to ease the path towards such endeavours, said Lewis, was consuming all the oxygen out of the political conversation. They are “big, manly things with huge work camps entailed in remote areas,” Lewis continued. “Their impacts on Indigenous women and girls are intense, are horrifying.” He was, in effect, calling the predominantly blue-collar workers—mostly men—who labour in remote camps like the ones where I work rapists and murderers.

One might protest that he didn’t mean all of us, but he was clear enough about the supposed cause of such crimes: gather working-class men together and they’ll inevitably get up to no good.

Avi Lewis during the NDP leadership French debate says in English "All of this talk of nation building projects that has consumed the oxygen of our political conversation in Canada.""They're big, manly things with huge work camps entailed in remote areas. They the impacts on… https://t.co/Ta74fJ4G44 pic.twitter.com/l16ZH8QoRU— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) November 28, 2025

Avi Lewis during the NDP leadership French debate says in English "All of this talk of nation building projects that has consumed the oxygen of our political conversation in Canada.""They're big, manly things with huge work camps entailed in remote areas. They the impacts on… https://t.co/Ta74fJ4G44 pic.twitter.com/l16ZH8QoRU

The Starlink satellite internet we have at camp can at times be as janky as that old propane heater, but we do have Iinternet access, and news about what Lewis had said about our industry very much made it up there. It would not be true to say that Lewis’s words instantly dissuaded my workmates from voting for the NDP; many of them were already of a mind that the party, at least in Ottawa, is unremittingly committed to taking away their jobs (the provincial wings, with their own set of big manly resource projects, tend to get a better hearing). After all, it was federal NDP MP Charlie Angus who in 2024 used the opportunity of a rare private-member’s bill to push for an act that would ban “promotion” of fossil fuels (indifferent to how necessary they continue to be while we steadily sunset them over the coming decades in order to zero out greenhouse gas emissions). Scofflaws of the ultimately failed legislation would be subject to fines of up to a million dollars or even jail time.

So folks were used to irksome comments from federal New Democrats about the resource sector. To them, activists in and around the party seemed reflexively opposed to any logging, however sustainable; eager to blockade any pipeline, even if it posed less risk of spills than transporting the same fuel by truck or rail; and ready to campaign against any hydroelectric dam or nuclear plant, however low-carbon.

I’m a long-standing supporter of the NDP and a committed democratic socialist. I joined the party as a teenager and have knocked on doors or phone-banked every election that I’ve been able to. I’ve been a science writer and political commentator for the American socialist magazine Jacobin for over a decade. My second book offers a popular introduction to economic planning and a robust defence of the public sector. I’ve been a member of three different trade unions and have lost count of how many picket lines I’ve walked. I believe that government and industry are not going fast enough to arrest dangerous climate change. And it infuriated me to hear Lewis slander me and my fellow resource-sector workers.

Yet, as I wrote on social media, it isn’t so much his comment, as what it represents, that enrages. Lewis’s accusation is emblematic of the wider drift on parts of the left toward an agenda of eco-austerity that critiques resource and infrastructure development and tries to stop them, instead of, as the left used to argue for, an agenda that critiques markets and so attempts to place them under democratic control. Where once the left was embedded in the working-class and blue-collar labour in particular, with left parties even often founded by miners, today, that old left has been body-snatched by middle-class professionals, by NGO staffers and activist-academics, while large parts of the working-class increasingly abandon the left and vote for the right.

If Canadian labour martyr and coal miner Ginger Goodwin were alive right now, he’d be attacked as a shill for the mining industry and fossil fuel interests. The labour hymn “Solidarity Forever” once saluted “we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade / Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid,” and lamented how “Now we stand outcast and starving ’midst the wonders we have made.” New lyrics perhaps need to be drafted to denounce all these industrial wonders as in fact ecocidal and extractivist crimes against the planet.

To be sure, many parts of Lewis’s labour platform, from making it easier to form a union to expanding sectoral bargaining, are excellent. His call to fix the country’s dire health care crisis by properly restoring funding to the system and expanding it to pharmacare and dental care for all (without means testing) is exactly what’s needed, as is taking profit-making out of elder care—the incentive structure that killed so many senior citizens during the pandemic.

But there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of his plan. He calls for a Green New Deal with a million new clean energy jobs. Yet if remote work camps are off the table, how are we to build the solar panels, wind turbines—and yes, the nuclear reactors and hydro dams he opposes—without mining the minerals required to manufacture them? Why shouldn’t mining jobs be part of that Green New Deal?

Lewis says he wants power lines, not pipelines. But expanding transmission across a country this vast will require many more of those same remote construction camps he decries. And while fossil fuels must be phased out, the fuels we continue to rely on during that transition must be as clean and safe as possible. Pipelines are far less likely to produce oil spills than other means of transport, and much (though not all) of Canada’s fossil fuel production is relatively less dirty thanks in part to the predominance of hydroelectricity in much of our grid. The reality is more complex than slogans like “Keep it in the ground” suggest.

Canada also possesses one of the greatest bounties of critical mineral resources in the world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the pace of the clean transition will depend, in no small part, on how quickly those resources are developed. Lewis wants to accelerate that transition while simultaneously constraining the extraction required to achieve it. The irony of this degrowth, anti-development approach is that, in undermining blue-collar employment, it risks slowing the very transition it claims to champion.

Lewis wants a public option telecommunications enterprise. That’s a great idea. We could extend high-speed internet and mobile service to wherever there are citizens, rather than, as now, only to places profitable enough to attract private investment. Profitable urban networks could cross-subsidize rural and remote connections, much as the post office does. But building out infrastructure in those less profitable regions will still require, inevitably, more remote construction camps. First Nations deserve equal access to health care and clean water, yet constructing clinics, water systems, and sewage infrastructure in remote areas will once again mean work camps staffed largely by blue-collar tradespeople—many of them men.

Professor and political scientist Laurie Adkin wrote in Canadian Dimension recently that my critique of Lewis’s anti-resource project stance “marginalize[s] eco-feminist proposals for a care economy that values the provision of human needs over commodity production,” and that I and Gil McGowan, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, who reposted my comments on X, are “steeped in a culture of petro-masculinity.” But how do we produce all the equipment in our hospitals and schools, never mind build those care-economy buildings, without materials that come from deep underground? Mine is not, as Adkin suggests, a charge of hypocrisy against those who oppose mining while continuing to use its products; it is a criticism of a deeper misunderstanding about where the material foundations of our society come from and how they are made. It may be dismissed as a mining industry “talking point” to say that nearly everything we use is either grown on a farm or dug from the earth. But it is a talking point because it captures a basic material truth. There can be no care economy—no hospitals, schools, clinics, or infrastructure—without the production of mineral commodities.

Suncor’s Fort Hills camp in Alberta’s Athabasca region. Photo by Jason Woodhead/Flickr.

It has not been conclusively demonstrated that remote work camps systematically produce horrifying, intense impacts on Indigenous women and girls. Much of what passes for research on the subject is largely self-referential, non-quantitative, anecdotal, written by activists (not epidemiologists or criminologists), and in many cases assumes the argument that these documents set out to prove.

For evidence of links between resource extraction camps and violence against Indigenous women and girls, activists point to the 2019 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIWG) inquiry’s final report. That document cites, amongst others, a 2016 report from the Native Youth Sexual Health Network that says “Scholarship around these issues has shown there are links between the presence of the tar sands industry and heightened rates of missing and murdered Indigenous Two Spirits, women and girls.” That report’s citation supporting the claim about this scholarship in turn comes from A Line in the Tar Sands, a book by activists about the Alberta oil industry more broadly. There are no details about this issue in the book other than a single sentence that states: “The tar sands boom in the Fort McMurray area of Alberta has been responsible for a range of oppressive and colonial impacts. There are links between the presence of the tar sands industry and heightened rates of missing and murdered Indigenous two-spirits, women, and girls.”

When we do look at the source for the claim as it is made in that book, the authors point still further to a three-page 2013 press release about an anti-tar sands protest by the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, which simply re-states the claim but this time without any citation, asserting “environmental violence that appears in areas with resource extraction like the Tar Sands include: Increased rates of sexual, domestic and family violence; High rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls.” In other words, the scholarly source the Native Youth Sexual Health Network relies on for its claim is a statement—made without citation—by the Native Youth Sexual Health Network itself. It’s circular reasoning. At no point has anyone performed the basic due diligence required of a serious research effort to determine what the evidence actually shows.

The MMIWG report certainly cites other papers and reports beyond just the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, but they fit a similar pattern.

Another key paper regularly cited by activists and their reports that does actually attempt to consider such evidence, does not claim what the activists says it does, but instead states that during the construction of the Mount Milligan mine camp, data released by the Fort St. James RCMP show a 38 percent increase in sexual assault in the region. This sounds convincing at first, but the document itself is careful to remind readers not to draw too many conclusions, noting that this figure is not definitive because the data are only compared across a single year. In other words, there is no time series here, so we don’t know at all what the trend is. Any increase in sexual assault is of course to be deplored, but the absolute numbers are also not large: in the area, reported sexual assaults increased from 16 to 22. A small absolute increase produced a large percentage increase. Remember that an increase from one to two would have produced a 100 percent increase. We should always be careful not to play fast and loose with statistics, but especially when subjects of such import depend upon them. Furthermore, the mine is about 92 kilometres from Fort St. James—quite a distance—so it’s unclear how much the mine camp could have influenced events there. By comparison, Vanderhoof is closer, at 60 kilometres. And this example concerns just a single mine; we cannot extrapolate from it to all remote resource and infrastructure camps across Canada.

What research has shown is a link between low levels of economic development, inequality and prostitution (and in turn between prostitution and sexual violence). High wages, especially amongst young, single men, next to deep poverty can indeed produce an increase in prostitution. And the effect of high wages next to deep poverty certainly isn’t unique to camps for resource extraction and infrastructure construction. This happens in cities too. This problem can also be exacerbated by boom-and-bust cycles in the resource sector. When projects are located near a town rather than in remote areas, high wages can drive up housing and food costs, making it difficult for those outside the industry to make ends meet. Some women may feel they have little choice but to engage in sex work to get by—a pattern we also see in gentrifying neighbourhoods adjacent to slums, from Vancouver to St. John’s.

So long as we attack blue-collar men and the remote camps that the modern world and social justice reforms need for all of their inputs, we are distracting from the real drivers of increases in sexual violence: gross inequality and the free market that produces it.

In many, especially rural, parts of our country, resource and infrastructure projects are one of the best sources of employment. In northern Saskatchewan, uranium mining is the largest industrial employer of First Nations workers in the country. Thanks to generations of trade union struggle, as well as the labour legislation that flowed from it, these are usually good jobs. They have long since ceased to involve the conditions we see in sepia-toned 19th century photographs of malnourished child labourers down narrow, dust-filled shafts, but instead provide family-supporting, community maintaining wages for, yes, often hard but also often deeply rewarding work.

More such projects—so long as the revenues are shared equitably, meaning everyone in a community, not just the workers at a particular site—are one of our best hopes for improving rural prosperity and reducing inequality. This is what trade unionists and socialists have always demanded. We never used to want to shut mines and other industrial projects down, but to take them over.

If anything, a more muscular social democracy in Canada would deploy industrial policy, public enterprise and support for unions in the sector to sustainably expand resource extraction. The federal NDP should instead be promising to deliver Norway-style resource-based egalitarian prosperity while shaving off the harsh edges of boom-and-bust mineral extraction that the long-term nature of mine development can indeed sometimes tend towards. We could do this by using more interventionist policies and ensuring greater domestic value-added production while shepherding regional economic diversification to avoid boomtown social pathologies.

It is no wonder why the federal NDP is haemorrhaging votes from working-class and remote communities. They rightly view the anti-development wing of the left as a threat to their way of life, and that activist opposition is environmentally irrational and counterproductive. And they have seen this sort of class prejudice before. They know that accusations about “man-camps” made by activists—who often live in southern cities far from the reality of rural life and who typically come from class positions cut off from blue-collar existence—are just the latest iteration of age-old middle-class fear and loathing of blue-collar men.

Only a few years ago, the presidential hopes of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton were in part undone after she denounced voters from often deindustrialized rust-belt regions who were leaning toward Donald Trump, suggesting they “wanted to restore an America that no longer exists.” She infamously referred to them as a “basket of deplorables,” a remark many interpreted as branding them sexist, racist, and backward. Some of her defenders compounded the impression, arguing that those communities should abandon hopes of reviving industry or mining and instead simply “learn to code.” In the years since, Democrats have struggled to repair the damage that episode did to the party’s image among working-class voters, once a central pillar of their base.

If Avi Lewis becomes leader and fails to reverse course on his opposition to resource projects, then the federal NDP will likely struggle to undo the Clinton-scale damage that his “big, manly” man-camps remark—and its associated anti-development agenda—has done to the party amongst its traditional base. And not just amongst the blue-collar men he slandered either; any worker, whatever colour collar, whatever sector, whatever gender, can sniff out someone who thinks they’re better than them.

Were Robert Service around, he might be forced to adjust his doggerel:

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was a movement of workers turned eco-berserkers Destroying their own part´y.

Leigh Phillips is a geologist and journalist. He is the author of Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts (2015) and co-author of The People’s Republic of Walmart (2019).

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