Taking the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) as its focus, this paper critically examines the Canadian government’s efforts to regulate the extractive industry. Using insight from ideology theory and critical discourse analysis, and drawing empirically from Canadian Parliamentary debates, official government and NGO reports, and various news items regarding the development of the CORE, we document how dominant voices prioritized the economy, downplayed the systemic violence of the industry, and redirected blame to “underdeveloped” countries, on route to a regulatory framework that is voluntary and which fails to address the underlying causes of corporate harm and violence. While the CORE represents a “logical” state response to corporate crime, we nevertheless emphasize the importance of ongoing debates about its role in combating corporate impunity. This not only reinforces the idea that (capitalist) dominance is never absolute but signals the ever-present nature of resistance and possibility for change.

This paper argues that patterns of pervasive police violence can and should be treated as organizational crime in Canada. It uses the documented events of police violence in Val d’Or, Quebec, that emerged in 2015 to show how a similar fact pattern might fit all of the elements of organizational crime as defined in the Criminal Code. The article also suggests that this is an example where legal imagination is important, in order to shift our collective understanding of what organizational crime is and where it occurs.

This article interrogates the laws that govern safety crimes, harmful but typically unintentional acts of negligence that occur in the production of goods and services. Acts that injure employees at work are commonly depicted in legal discourses as accidents and penalized through administrative laws, although other negligent acts such as driving offences causing injury or death are treated as potentially criminal events. Through a discourse analysis of legal and regulatory texts and documents, the authors argue that the constitution of workplace safety crime is rooted in complex historical factors that shape state responses to corporate wrongdoing. This article documents the roots of this “common sense” view of workplace crime, empirically focusing on Canadian corporate negligence law, and concludes with tentative strategies of resistance and change.