MP McKay goes into the lion’s den

John McKay proved that he isn’t afraid to walk straight into a hornet’s nest.

The federal Liberal member of parliament spoke before some of the mining industry’s elite at a luncheon hosted by the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum on April 15 at the National Club in Toronto.

McKay has earned a bad reputation in such circles for the private members Bill C-300 he tabled in February 2009 that would impose new guidelines for miners and oil companies in foreign countries and dish out penalties if they are broken.

The bill was narrowly passed by the House of Commons and now has to pass a third vote in Parliament before being approved by the Senate.

“I don’t think I’ll convince anyone (about the merits of the bill),” a realistic McKay said from the podium, “but this is a good opportunity to share ideas.”

Once he was finished laying out his case, McKay thanked the crowd for not throwing anything at him while he spoke. The joke may have been met with heartier laughter if it didn’t speak so directly to the palpable tension in the room.

That tension was perhaps best vented through the words of Tony Andrews, the executive director of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC). Andrews said the bill was “intellectually tiny” but “huge in impact.”

Andrews’ comment played off of McKay’s own constant refrain that he didn’t understand why miners were getting so upset over what was in his opinion, a “tiny” bill.

McKay tried to pitch Bill C-300 as a modest bill that would enhance corporate Canada’s reputation abroad by creating an official avenue for complaints against miners to be heard and investigated.

If a complaint were found to have merit, then any funding from the Canadian government would be cut.

But what irks miners isn’t the potential lack of funding, nor the accountability the bill calls for — Andrews himself said the PDAC is in favour of tightening existing policies to ensure that miners behave themselves. What is troublesome to the industry is the underlying assumption that anyone, with any motive, would see his or her complaint legitimatized and subsequently development of a project would get stuck in a quagmire while the issue is sorted out.

To counter such concerns, and many others he has heard since tabling the bill, McKay reduced his argument to four essential points.

The point he repeated the most often was that if the bill were made into law it would actually benefit the industry because it would allow an accused company to, in his words, “clear the air.”

He also said the fear that the bill would usher in a “tsunami of complaints” was unfounded and offered in support of his belief that the World Bank has only received 118 such complaints since 2001.

As for the charge that stricter regulation would compel companies to move their head offices out of Canada, McKay asked rhetorically: “Where would they go?”

He said both the U.S. and Britain are proposing regulations that are tougher than Bill C-300 and opined that would only leave Switzerland as a substitute. For some unstated reason, McKay didn’t believe Switzerland to be a viable option.

McKay also argued that, contrary to what the industry has said, the bill would not make Canadian miners less competitive on the global stage. Instead, he argued, they would be more competitive because the Canadian corporate brand would be stronger. In support of this, he offered that ethical funds would be more likely to invest in Canadian miners if they knew there was a legal mechanism that ensured higher ethical standards.

In short, McKay was peddling the idea that Bill C-300 was actually in the “enlightened self interest” of miners.

Such a position was a hard sell.

Indeed, the question period that followed the speech had to be stopped in the interest of time with a bevy of attendees with their hands raised — only too eager to launch another salvo of questions at McKay.

One of the key concerns raised by those in attendance was that the bill had its genesis in the offices of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — organizations that have little understanding of how things work on the mining side.

McKay not only conceded that the bill was the brainchild of NGOs, but also said he had no problem being labeled a “captive” of such NGOs because, he said, they were widely respected groups.

Andrews, however, argued that McKay made a grave error by not consulting with miners from the onset, and said the issues that the bill seeks to tackle would be better resolved by people that have hard-won knowledge in the field, not politicians.