Anti-Mining Bill Heads To Committee

The 20th trading week of the year was marked by the beginning of committee work on one of the more anti-miner bills to move through Canada’s House of Commons in recent years. Bill C-300, also cited as An Act Respecting Corporate Accountability for Mining, Oil and Gas Corporations in Developing Countries, passed second reading on April 22, squeaking through with a vote of 137-133.

It’s now before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development for further study.

This private member’s bill is sponsored by backbench Liberal Member of Parliament John McKay. He is a lawyer from the suburban Toronto riding of Scarborough-Guildwood, which is notable for its complete lack of mines, oil wells or resource companies. McKay says his bill is designed to “promote responsible environmental practices and international human rights standards” on the part of Canadian mining, oil and gas corporations in developing countries.

We’d call it a solution in search of a problem. Canadian mining companies generally behave very well in the developing world. And if they don’t, they are adequately held to account by their host country’s government, who oftentimes use bureaucracies and regulatory regimes that the Canadian government fostered in the first place through its foreign aid programs.

The heart of McKay’s bill is this: it gives the ministers of foreign affairs and international trade new responsibility to hold Canadian resource corporations accountable for their practices in developing countries by submitting annual reports to the House of Commons and Senate for review. The ministries, led by Trade, would then have power to sanction delinquent companies, for instance by withdrawing or withholding project funding from arms such as the Export Development Corporation and the Canada Pension Plan.

McKay’s bill is for now winning out two other approaches: a more activist private member’s bill C-298, sponsored by Ottawa Centre New Democratic Party MP Paul Dewar, which targets only mining companies and would create a powerful Office of the Ombudsman that could haul mining company executives before costly, politically charged inquiries; and the minority Conservative government’s mining-industry approved proposal in March to create a toothless Office of the Extractive Sector Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Counsellor, plus a CSR Centre of Excellence.

(In a demonstration of just how goofy the NDP can be at times, their bill C-298 proposed something– spending taxpayers’ money — that a private member’s bill can’t actually do.)

If C-300 looks fairly innocuous, don’t be deceived. In McKay’s remarks to parliament, he sighed wistfully that he would have preferred a powerful CSR ombudsman and specifically thanked anti-mining NGOs such as MiningWatch Canada and the socialist collective Halifax Initiative among other leftist groups for their help in his efforts. These NGOs are the fellow travellers who regularly single out Barrick Gold as Enemy Number 1 in the mining industry for its behaviour overseas.

Now, we all know in this business that Barrick has an exemplary CSR program. The real reason these NGO zealots go after this specific company, rather than some of the scruffier ones at the margins who might be doing real harm, is that Barrick has deep pockets and is a flagship for capitalism in the mining sector.

The lack of environmental protests by the greenies against state-owned or heavily unionized mines here and abroad is telling.

To the zealots: if you’re in favour of socialism, be honourable enough to come right out and lobby the public for it directly. Please stop using phony concern for the world’s poor or the environment as a cloak while you go about your real aim of putting in place socialist policies, regulations and laws without the electorate’s informed approval.

If Bill C-300 is successful, the two federal ministers in question will no doubt be deluged with complaints from enviro-kooks and cranks from around the world (as we tend to be), but the ministries will have little ability to properly investigate the wild talk flooding in from remote places on the other side of the world.

Worse, since bureaucracies as a rule self-perpetuate, the generally very good behaviour of Canadian miners overseas means the federal bureaucrats will inevitably wind up investigating spurious and vexatious claims for years on end to keep the paycheques coming. It’s a pattern we’ve already seen with our abusive, quasi-judicial human rights commissions, which perversely started curbing precious free speech rights when they soon ran out of genuine human rights cases to deal with.