Ideational De-Risking and the Hegemony of “National” Critical Minerals: On “Major Projects” in Canada

This paper examines the emerging hegemony around critical minerals development in Canada, grounded in an analysis of the Major Projects Office and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s broader “major projects” push. The concept of “ideational de-risking” is proposed to describe the discursive-cultural power exerted by the state to de-risk critical minerals projects, which operates alongside political-economic conceptualizations of the de-risking state and the “Wall Street Consensus.” Ideational de-risking invokes a national infrastructural canon and external threats to national sovereignty to embed resource extraction within the nation’s political culture, while simultaneously legitimizing the de-risking state as the standard for state management. These emerging vocabularies of hegemony become formalized within institutions like Canada’s Major Projects Office, which works to promote the interests of extractive capital even while appearing ineffective at traditional forms of regulatory and financial de-risking.