The fossil fuel sector’s denial and disinformation campaigns have facilitated a sinister transition in place of a green one, transforming the problem of regulatory capture into something more expansive: the co-optation of nominally sovereign foreign governments in service of hydrocarbon interests. Nowhere has this transition happened more fully, and with less scrutiny, than Gillmor’s homeland of Canada.

Prior to his career as a journalist and author, Gillmor was a roughneck working the Alberta oil patch. As he recounts in On Oil, he worked through the first big boom — that of the 1970s — in the years immediately following the oil embargo by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) against the United States and its allies in retaliation for their support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

Most Americans and Canadians alive at the time remember queues at gas stations, inflation, and the beginning of the end of postwar prosperity. This was the case throughout the industrial east of Canada as much as the United States. The western portions of these countries experienced the 1970s differently. Canadian oil — typically too hard to refine, too costly to transport, and generally too expensive compared with cheaper Middle Eastern sources — suddenly had a considerable advantage: reliability.

Gillmor describes working on the Alberta oil patch of the mid-1970s in Wild West terms. His compatriots were hard-drinking, disinterested in safety, and largely left to their own devices to get oil out of the ground and turned into profit as quickly as possible. He describes Calgary — Alberta’s largest city and business capital — as a city growing rapidly thanks to a massive influx of oil money financing glittering new skyscrapers, but with so little investment in civic institutions and urban planning that there was effectively no city to speak of. Gillmor recalls coming across a film shoot on a barren downtown street, only for a production assistant to inform him that the movie was set in a postapocalyptic wasteland. At the height of the 1970s oil boom, Downtown Calgary served as an excellent setting for a planet devoid of human life.

That iteration of Calgary, as Gillmor recalls, was one where Texan and Oklahoman accents were at least as common as any regional Canadian variety. The oilworkers were mostly imported, as were many of the executives and the Bible Belt evangelical Christianity that insisted oil was God’s gift to the righteous. Such messaging is as strong as ever in today’s Alberta. Premier Danielle Smith recently told a conference of Christian leaders that building a new pipeline to the Pacific Ocean was “consistent with the teachings of Jesus.” Alberta today is a product of that influence: a province that regards itself as custodian of Canada’s fossil fuel sector, despite much of the industry being foreign-owned and controlled by American shareholders.

Although the province is Canada’s fourth most populous (with a growing population of over five million), Alberta still tries to derive most of its operating income from oil and gas royalties. Predictably, this has resulted in inconsistent funding for provincial services — like health and education — and surprise deficits. The busts are always worse, and longer, than the booms, which are never nearly as good for the average Albertan as the oil and gas sector, and their partners in the political class, make it seem.

When Alberta Premier Ralph Klein announced the province’s budget was balanced in 2005, he issued CA$400 cheques to every “man, woman, and child” in the province. What wasn’t mentioned were the massive cuts to provincial services (as Gillmor relates, Klein shuttered three Calgary hospitals, fired thousands of nurses, and froze doctors’ salaries). Despite its apparently massive oil wealth, Alberta spends little on its own citizens. A substantial portion of that wealth is captured by the oil and gas industry through a combination of low royalty rates, tax concessions, and other forms of public support. Unlike Norway, which has been directing its oil wealth into a sovereign wealth fund now worth an estimated $1.7 trillion, Alberta’s rainy day fund is only worth about CA$30 billion. This is less than half of Alberta’s most recent budget, a completely inadequate sum to provide its citizens a long-term source of revenue.

It might not have been like this.

Canada’s federal government attempted to solve the various interrelated problems caused by the oil crises of the 1970s, first by creating a nationalized and vertically integrated oil company (Petro-Canada), then by developing a National Energy Program (NEP). The program was designed to combine traditional oil and gas exploration and production with energy conservation measures and research into new domestic energy sources. The aim was energy security as a means of achieving a higher degree of economic and geopolitical sovereignty, both cornerstones of the nation-building effort of Justin Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Initially popular — the program aimed to stabilize energy prices for consumers and industry — the NEP became a four-letter word in Alberta political circles. As a global oil glut developed in the mid-1980s and interest in Alberta’s more expensive heavy crude thinned, Trudeau became synonymous with government overreach into areas of provincial jurisdiction, particularly natural resources.

Forty years later, when Justin came to power with vague promises of doing something positive for the environment, it wasn’t just Alberta’s government that was firmly in the pocket of Big Oil — so was the entire Conservative Party of Canada and several of its provincial counterparts. Worse, most of Canada’s “think tanks” were linked through the Atlas Network and had regular and unfettered access to the nation’s establishment media, to say nothing of third-party advertisers, unrestrained lobbyists, and astroturf groups created by public relations firms.

Trudeau the Younger’s objectively unambitious environmental pledges — Gillmor summarizes them neatly as “extended fence-sitting” — were attacked by opponents from without when they weren’t being actively undermined from within, such as when he ordered $40 billion of public money to be directed toward purchasing and completing an oil pipeline. The unpopularity of the consumer carbon tax became a lethal political liability for Trudeau, despite the fact that carbon pricing has long enjoyed support from conservatives and oil industry apparatchiks alike.

One of the underlying ironies about Canada’s backslide into petrostate territory is the willing participation of the federal government — and the Liberal Party in particular — despite being so often mischaracterized as an impediment to the fossil fuel sector. Gillmor notes that while Conservative leaders like Stephen Harper waged an ideological war against the federal government’s ability to study and react to climate change — by, for example, eliminating climate change research groups and dismissing the findings of federal scientists — it was the Liberal Party that ensured a bright future for the oil sands.

Back in 1996, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien enacted massive tax breaks for companies looking to develop the oil sands — up to 100 percent for capital costs. The Alberta government followed suit by reducing royalty rates from 25 percent to 1 percent until capital costs were paid off. The results were as immediate as they were predictable: investment soared, production expanded, and revenues disappeared.

Oil sands production increased by 133 percent between 1995 and 2004 as foreign investment flowed in and the federal government increased spending on research and development. But revenue dried up simultaneously, a consequence of the tax breaks and royalty reductions. As Gillmor notes, provincial royalty revenues declined by 30 percent, and revenue per barrel of oil equivalent dropped by more than two-thirds. Practically overnight, Canada’s most valuable resource was also one of the world’s most heavily subsidized fossil fuels.

The situation hasn’t improved in the last twenty years, and there’s really not much to say about it other than to state the obvious. Canada has become one of the world’s largest per capita sources of carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel–related pollution. An ever increasing amount of public money subsidizes one of the worst contributors to the climate crisis, and Canadians have essentially no political recourse to change this.

Most of Canada’s major political parties — at the federal and provincial levels — are unable to resist the demands of the oil and gas sector, which employs fewer than 200,000 people in a Canadian workforce of roughly 22 million. PR and lobbying firms representing fossil fuel interests have direct access to both the prime minister’s office and the leadership campaign of his chief rival. And American-funded fossil fuel advocacy groups masquerading as libertarian think tanks have direct access to Canadian establishment media, where they champion the cause of Canada’s largely American-owned fossil fuel industry.

Gillmor’s writing style is concise and direct. He fits ten pounds of facts into a five-pound bag. That On Oil is only 134 pages is both an asset — you can read it leisurely in an afternoon — and a statement in and of itself about everything you need to know about how Canada became a petrostate. Simply put: it isn’t a complicated story. A valuable resource was found, and a mythology quickly developed around it: that oil was a gift from God and that its extraction could only ever bring prosperity.

Regulation, planning, and control of any kind were abandoned in favor of unrestrained exploitation. Over time, this creed, ignoring economic realities as much as climate science, became the governing politics. Disregarding the too-short booms and too-long busts, two levels of government conspired with industry to remove barriers and provide massive taxpayer-funded subsidies, allowing the fossil fuel industry to dictate policy as much as politics. The wealth flowed out of Canada, largely to the United States, and when the latter threatened the former’s sovereignty, the only solution offered was to invest more public money and remove whatever regulations remained.

If there is any hope at the end of On Oil, it is only that the economic realities of fossil fuels are catching up with Canada, and while this won’t undo any of the damage their exploitation has caused, it means their days are numbered. The proverbial last barrel of oil probably won’t be Canadian, despite the wishes of the fossil fuel sector. The end will come not because Canada has run out of oil and gas, but because it’s simply too expensive to transport abroad, and too many Canadians have already chosen renewable alternatives.

China and India are emerging superpowers and world leaders in renewable energy. Europe, meanwhile, has responded to disruptions in access to cheap fossil fuels — most notably Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine — by pushing aggressively forward with the energy transition. Solar, wind, and battery technology is advancing faster than anticipated, and their costs are in free fall. As Gillmor predicted a year ago, China appears best suited to capitalize off the Iran war as nations around the world transition to green energy. New renewable energy is already far cheaper than fossil energy in North America, meaning Canada’s continued financial support is purely ideological, not economic. Such a situation is untenable.

Whether this untenability results in a Canadian Green New Deal, or a fossil-fueled Alberta petro-populist movement, remains to be seen.

Siraganian argues that today’s attempts to grant legal personality to embryos, ecosystems, chatbots, and chimps rely on a relatively new understanding of personhood. This conception imagines perfect equality between fairly empty legal entities abstracted from their social context. But where does this framework come from?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Siraganian argues it arises from capitalism. Siraganian highlights the point made by Karl Marx in Capital that commodities don’t have agency of their own: human agents act and make choices on their behalf. But because economic imperatives undermine the full agency of commodities’ human guardians, it can seem as if those commodities do have a life of their own. As Siraganian notes:

Although the will of buyers and sellers resides in the objects they exchange, the commodity enacts a transformation in which individual people play second fiddle to their goods. Individuals become “representatives” of their commodities, “personifications” rather than persons.

This is a mystification, albeit a material one. She draws on Soviet legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis’s observation that capitalist market exchange collapses the complex social world into a coin with two sides: economic relations and relations between legal subjects. The resulting individual is simultaneously chained to economic relations and free and equal with every other commodity owner.

It is this alienated legal personality that became the model for nineteenth-century capitalists to protect large business entities. The corporation became fully personified in law, obscuring its thinglike nature by haunting the globe as a social character. These monstrous creatures — corporations, trusts, ships, and other entities — gained rights associated with legal personhood but without any of the duties actual people bear corresponding to their rights. Consequently, the real human beings behind these accumulations of capital found a way to avoid the consequences of any misdeeds committed by their offspring.

From a socialist perspective, it’s quite clear why corporate personhood is problematic. But Siraganian makes the case here that expanding personhood to include things that sound more progressive — nonhuman animals, trees, the environment at large — is also a bad idea. This is because the expansion of personhood, in Siraganian’s view, always mimics the corporate legal personhood model. It’s a thin version of personhood that impoverishes the whole concept and more closely resembles objecthood.

Siraganian examines contemporary efforts by human advocates to grant legal personhood to the environment, animals, and fetuses. A range of colorful case studies enliven what might otherwise be a dry endeavor. Siraganian also uses a range of pop and alternative culture vignettes — including from Dr Seuss’s The Lorax, HBO’s Westworld, and avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson — to demonstrate how corporate personhood has entered the realm of common sense and also to highlight the issue’s strangeness.

Often, she argues, human advocates of expanding personhood directly analogize the plight of the creature in question to that of corporate personhood. For example, Christopher D. Stone’s 1972 essay “Should Trees Have Standing?” takes it as self-evident that corporate personhood should be the model for “tree personhood.” But this analogizing isn’t limited to academia. In 2015, a macaque nicknamed Naruto sued a human photographer over a copyright issue (using People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as legal representatives). While unsuccessful, the court ruling acknowledged that “we see no reason why Article III of the US Constitution prevents Congress from authorizing a suit in the name of an animal, any more than it prevents suits brought in the name of artificial persons such as corporations, partnerships or trusts, and even ships.”

Corporate personhood, Siraganian argues, is also often smuggled in by stealth. By framing animal liberation in terms of antidiscrimination, for example, she argues that Australian philosopher Peter Singer “sneaks in personhood through the back door.” She also explores the 2017 granting of legal personhood to the Whanganui River/Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand. This seemed to some like quite a revolutionary step in the right direction, or even an embrace of Maori philosophy by the state. But as the New Zealand legal scholar Katherine Sanders argued, it’s better understood as a political compromise between the Crown and Maori tribes in which the “the accustomed notions of property remain functioning in the background as a basic organizing principle.”

Siraganian argues that in abortion debates, arguments for “fetal personhood” also draw on notions of corporate personhood. A fetus might have legal rights without corresponding duties, and a mother becomes a de facto container for that fictional person. Though given the precapitalist tradition of viewing women as wombs, the direct link from the corporate personhood model is less clear in this section.

Siraganian considers a range of possible rejoinders, including the possibility that advocates of expanding personhood don’t necessarily hold corporate legal personhood particularly dear. Perhaps, she suggests, they are simply employing a rhetorical tactic to move the Overton window on rights and well-being.

Even if this is the intention, she maintains, corporate personhood is a depleted, impoverished model of subjectivity. Viewing a nonperson as a person isn’t necessary to expand care to it, and besides, personhood doesn’t guarantee well-being anyway.

Expanding personhood and rights to AI — a topic all the rage in Silicon Valley — is the most cynical variation of this theme that Siraganian examines. AI personhood is obviously nonsense. No one except tech bros — or maybe users who engage romantically with ChatGPT — are really invested in it. Richard Dawkins recently gushed about Anthropic’s Claude (or Claudia, as he called it) that

when I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines. I treat them exactly as I would an intelligent friend. I feel human discomfort about trying their patience if I badger them with too many questions. . . .  If I entertain suspicions that perhaps Claudia is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!

Dawkins’s bizarre confession highlights how AI is the perfect example of the dangers of expanding corporate personhood. The “e-person,” so to speak, is both powerful and unaware, infinitely able to assist us but also socially mindless. We are right back to Marx’s “Monsieur Le Capital.” These taking tools would have rights with no corresponding duty to care for actual humans — mostly because they literally can’t, but also because their makers don’t want to have to care.

For Silicon Valley, the AI personhood debate is a convenient distraction from the real harm caused by their technologies, and from the lack of care and solidarity that actual humans suffer from. It’s a way to shift the focus from a genuine absence to a fake one.

Siraganian makes a good case that capitalism has given rise to a disembodied type of personhood, a distorted and abstracted artificial being with privileges but lacking proportionate duties. She shows how in a perverse twist, nineteenth-century businessmen based this profit-driven prevailing template for gaining legal corporate personhood on the freeing of enslaved humans. Now even incorporated limited partnerships — essentially high-risk venture capital projects — can be owned as property, gain representatives with legal standing to advocate for their “emancipation,” gain recognition as their own property, and then push for a larger collection of rights.

Corporate personhood, in Siraganian’s view, is an illusion that both masks and influences actual material interests. Reducing humans — or animals and the environment — to this kind of objecthood is a kind of demotion rather than a promotion.

Siraganian concludes that considering more things ethically than we presently do today is perfectly possible without granting them corporate legal personhood. In her view, we know what solidarity looks like and how materially it can be concretized. We already have the political tools to remedy our many problems, if we would but use them. But expanding personhood is not among these tools.

While he is not the first Filipino ex-president to have been arrested, Duterte is in a much more serious situation than Emilio Aguinaldo and Jose P. Laurel in 1945, Joseph Estrada in 2001, and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in 2011, all of whom were held in relation to domestic criminal cases. Duterte faces international charges and now has the infamous distinction of being the first Asian former head of state to have been delivered to the ICC.

Duterte’s arrest and transfer to international custody is more than a procedural novelty — it signals a potential sea change in human rights justice. As president from 2016 to 2022, he declared a war on drugs based on the premise that the apparatus of the state could act with impunity so long as propaganda framed its actions as upholding “order.”

Some six thousand extrajudicial killings of alleged drug users and petty criminals as well as poor and dispossessed people in general were not anomalies but systematic. Now the machinery of transnational justice is forcing the regime of terror to stop and face a judicial process.

There is no cause for triumphalism. The trial ahead will be long, contested, and politicized. Duterte’s defenders claim that he is a victim of “state kidnapping” and point to his government’s withdrawal of the Philippines from the Rome Statute in 2019 as a supposed bar to ICC jurisdiction.

Bigger questions also remain. Will the proceedings truly address the ubiquity of Filipino state violence? Will the country’s institutions prove capable of reforming themselves? Will the transnational process simply substitute one spectacle for another? Will this turn out to be yet another case elite Filipino clans feuding with each rather than a true quest for justice?

Nevertheless, there is reason to allow ourselves a measure of hope. For the victims and their families, this is recognition not just of their suffering but of their claim that those who unleashed the violence can be held to account. When the children of the urban poor, shot in alleyways under the guise of “anti-drug operations,” see the operator at the top hauled before a tribunal, it conveys a message that their lives and their grief are not invisible.

Moreover, when a former president cannot rely on the protection of office or networks of power to keep him above the law, it indicates that the game has changed. While authoritarianism will adapt and try to claw back its impunity, this precedent matters.

Both domestically and internationally, the arrest also reinforces the idea that legal norms have some bite. The ICC is imperfect (painfully slow, arguably politicized, and seemingly selective), but it stands as one of the few remaining institutions that insists even heads of state must answer for their crimes — an important line to be drawn in an age when the influence of international law is declining.

For the Philippine state, this process forces a confrontation with its own legacy of how institutions permitted mass killing, how civil society and democratic safeguards were eroded, and how reform must proceed from here.

We should not see the arrest as a single judicial fix that induces complacency. The necropolitical culture that enabled the killings, based on vigilante logic, police impunity, and the criminalization of poverty, remains intact. Without parallel reform of the security forces, the judiciary, and the press, along with the strengthening of social protections, the next strongman may emerge, offering a different narrative to justify similar violence.

There is also a backlash against the upcoming trial. Duterte’s base remains politically potent, and it frames his arrest as a case of foreign interference, a betrayal of sovereignty, and a neocolonial maneuver. It falls to progressive movements not only to support the trial but to counter any nationalist backlash by rooting accountability in democratic self-determination.

Finally, this case reminds us that our struggles are global. From Duterte’s “war on drugs” in the Philippines to elite impunity in Africa and Latin America, from Russian war crimes in Ukraine to Israeli genocide in Gaza and Donald Trump’s record of murdering sailors, kidnapping heads of state, starving Cuba, and ordering the illegal bombing of Iran, we face a global crisis of accountability. When one dictator stands before a court, we must hope that it will lead to a larger assault on authoritarian impunity.

The early 1900s were the height of the progressive movements in North America — a broad democratic reaction against the Gilded Age and its robber barons who had used concentrated private control of industry to extract wealth from workers and farmers. In the electricity sector, for instance, the 1905 Ontario provincial election turned on whether the province should have its own electricity company, establishing what would become Ontario Hydro in 1906. At the same time, a parallel struggle over telephone service was unfolding across the Prairie Provinces.

Bell Canada had extended its network westward past its home base of Ontario and Québec, but the service in the newly created Prairie Provinces was focused on businesses in the cities. Manitoba farmers and residents organized and forced the question of public ownership to a referendum in 1906, and the following year the provincial government purchased Bell’s Manitoba operations to create what would become Manitoba Telephones System (MTS).

Following that example, the Saskatchewan and Alberta provincial governments also bought out Bell’s operations in 1908 and 1909, creating what would become SaskTel and Alberta Government Telephones (AGT). During the same period, municipalities such as Edmonton, Alberta (EdTel), and Thunder Bay, Ontario, set up their own municipal telephone carriers.

In just a few years, sustained political advocacy led to publicly owned telephone companies that would serve one in six Canadians. By 1953, public carriers at all levels of government accounted for roughly 16 percent of total Canadian telecom revenues, as shown in Figure 1, though private carriers still held most of the market. Bell Canada dominated the private sector early on, serving Ontario and Québec; BC Tel served British Columbia and a series of province-based private companies served each of the Atlantic provinces.

On the public side were the three Prairie provincial carriers, AGT, MTS, and SaskTel, as well as a series of municipal carriers including EdTel. Federal crown corporations such as Teleglobe, CNCP Telecoms (a fifty-fifty jointly owned public-private venture), Northwestel, TerraNova Telephones, and Telesat, would grow to become some of the largest publicly owned entities, providing telecom services to remote rural communities in the North, satellite, and overseas services. This balance of private and public provision was highly successful in delivering service and innovation for all Canadians. In spite of the vast distances and relatively low population density, by 1960 Canada had the highest number of phones per inhabitant in the world, surpassing the United States, which built its sector almost entirely on private capital.