This column was first published by Embassy, Canada’s foreign policy newsweekly. http://embassymag.ca/
Human rights advocates still pan mining industry, government efforts
Scattered among the kiosks at a large Canadian government promotional booth lies a stack of official-looking pamphlets titled ‘Corporate social responsibility: A business strategy that reflects Canadian values.’
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is visiting that booth, run by his own department. It’s the afternoon of March 5, the first official day of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s gargantuan mining conference, the largest event of its kind in the world.
Here in the belly of the sprawling Metro Toronto Convention Centre, he is being treated like a rock star: a pack of reporters and photographers follow his every move, while three of his handlers scurry behind him, trying to stay out of the snapshots and fretting about their minister taking a wrong turn.
Mr. Oliver is standing near the pamphlets, but his attention is being held by a booth crew explaining sections of a long scale model of Canada’s Green Mining Initiative encased in glass, complete with miniature toy dump trucks.
Mr. Oliver leans in and observes the toy trucks, nodding slowly at the crew’s explanation, looking serious and intrigued. But suddenly he’s back up, walking away towards another booth. The press pack springs into action, hoping to get another up-close shot. “We’re moving!” one handler exclaims excitedly to the other two.
One convention-goer, surprised by the parade of attention lavished on only one individual at this event that boasts tens of thousands of attendees from over 120 countries, leans in and whispers, “Who’s that?”
A mining behemoth
In fact, Mr. Oliver is known to many people here. As the Harper government’s point man on pipelines, oil, gas, gold, silver, and many other billion-dollar mining industries, he is the face of a federal government that is received warmly by the industry.
“Canada’s federal government plays a critical role in helping the mineral industry succeed and contribute to the economy of this country,” said PDAC president Scott Jobin-Bevans at the opening of the convention, with Mr. Oliver at his side.
Canada is a mining behemoth. Canadian companies in the sector account for almost half the mining activities in the world, in 100 countries, according to the government. It also says the sector and related industries contributed over $35 billion to Canada’s GDP in 2010.
The government has publicly defended mining practices like the oil sands, often under fire from opposition MPs and environmental groups, both at home and abroad. The Conservatives re-introduced a mineral exploration tax credit, a form of which expired in 2005, in their first budget in 2006, and they’ve extended it since then.
And they appear onside with the industry when it comes up against opposition to building pipelines. Mr. Oliver was in town in part to announce that his government expects to introduce legislation to make the regulatory system for certain resource projects in Canada “more efficient”—without, he says, undermining its quality and integrity.
But others don’t feel the love.
Karyn Keenan, program officer for the Halifax Initiative, a coalition of NGOs pushing for corporate social responsibility in the mining sector, argues that Canada’s laws and regulations, forcing companies to respect human rights abroad are very weak and mask serious problems.
“A range of Canadian mining companies are associated with accusations of murder, rape, corruption, forced displacement, and environmental destruction, worldwide. This abuse continues precisely because Canada lacks corporate social responsibility standards,” she wrote in an email to Embassy.
Ms. Keenan has long maintained that with very few exceptions, Canadian companies operating overseas do not need to respect any human rights regulatory provisions, and those that do exist are rarely enforced.
She also argues that the reporting requirements, and requirements overseeing Canadian embassies or financial support agencies like Export Development Canada, are not stringent enough, and the government does not have any “explicit” policy demonstrating that it expects Canadian companies to respect human rights abroad.
NGOs like MiningWatch Canada also think the country is not doing enough to respond to what it believes are pressing problems in countries where Canadian companies want more of a mining presence, like Honduras.
“We’re seeing that the public health and environmental impacts of operating mines are not being adequately addressed, in a context in which environmental activists and journalists are under threat in the country…we see the Canadian Embassy ignoring that reality,” said Jen Moore, MiningWatch Canada’s Latin America program co-ordinator.
The government, however, says it is taking the issue very seriously. While “problems arise from time to time,” said Mr. Oliver, “the Canadian companies have been overall—not in every case, but overall—acting in a very responsible way. That’s in part thanks to the country’s voluntary oversight mechanisms.
Central to this is the government’s CSR strategy, which it introduced in March 2009, saying it was building on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which include social, environmental, and human rights standards.
As part of that strategy, it created an official CSR counsellor, the office of which is now held by Marketa Evans, as well as a Centre of Excellence that provides CSR information to companies and NGOs.
It also instructed the Canadian International Development Agency and Natural Resources Canada to provide assistance to foreign governments to grow their capacity to manage their own resource development responsibly. And in October 2011, the government added to this a Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development that it says will conduct research on best practices for individual countries.
Canada has a “corporate social responsibility set of standards,” Mr. Oliver told Embassy at the convention, in response to a question on where he saw the limits of Canadian companies operating abroad.
“We would expect that Canadian companies will operate in accordance with our fundamental values” in foreign nations he said. If they can’t, “then they should avoid that country.”
Volunteerism
But the government still describes its strategy as “voluntary,” which leaves Ms. Keenan unimpressed.
“This government promotes voluntary guidelines with Canadian mining companies. But Canada has no mechanisms in place to compel companies to follow these guidelines…until such mechanisms are adopted, these deplorable practices are sure to continue,” she wrote.
And many critics of the industry like MiningWatch have also complained that Ms. Evans’ office has not been given enough teeth.
The counsellor attended the convention as part of a CSR panel. She discussed the issue of access to remedies—everything from apologies, to restitution, to financial compensation—that is addressed in the June 2011 United Nations Human Rights Council’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. She also discussed her dispute resolution plan in an opening statement, saying it was “very non-judicial; it’s meant to be a low barrier to access.”
But she was also careful to begin her remarks with a “disclaimer”—being appointed as a special adviser to Trade Minister Ed Fast, she said, means she plays no direct role in the Canadian government’s policy, and only speaks on her own behalf, not on behalf of the government.
Other observers point out issues with the companies themselves. Anthony Bebbington, director of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University, said it’s often the case that companies hold all the cards in their relationships with host governments.
“Companies have so much more information,” said Mr. Bebbington.
“At the point of negotiating projects, or particularly at the point of approving their environmental impact statement, the government—even if it has the people to be able to review the statement…doesn’t have many independent, autonomous sources of information with which it can verify what companies are saying.”
He said he’s talked with colleagues in El Salvador and in the government there, as well as in the Peruvian government, and “It’s a real problem for them.”
But Peter Sinclair, the vice president of corporate social responsibility at Barrick Gold—which has mines in Peru—said the company applies the same principles of assessing projects, including feasibility studies and environmental assessments, at every project they operate.
“I think governments do have varying capacities sometimes to assess that, and where we can, we try and find ways to assist without obviously interfering with their job as regulators.”
On March 2, Barrick set up a CSR advisory board, which it says will provide it with external guidance on the company’s performance in CSR worldwide, and on new best practices.
The board is staffed with CSR experts like Business for Social Responsibility president and CEO Aron Cramer, and recognizable names like diplomat Robert Fowler.
Mr. Sinclair said the company will “have to listen to what they say.” He said there wasn’t any point in establishing a board that would only pay lip service.
“It’s going to be a back-and-forth in terms of exchanging views on what’s going on, and the programs we have in place, and I think they will challenge us.”
Even so, Ms. Moore said the establishment of that board isn’t addressing her concerns.
“Right now we still don’t have any mechanisms to actually verify if the information that the company is putting out is true, and we have no mechanisms to investigate or hold them to account when things go wrong,” she said.