International Trade Committee on Dec. 1st, 2009

[Jamie Kneen]

--that's a separate concern.

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

—and then I'm going to come back.

I appreciate what you're saying there, but I don't think you understand. There are no rules at all there now. It's just basically that you're another country operating in a foreign area.

Go ahead.

[Jamie Kneen]

The concern, I think, is principally that the rules that could be introduced would restrict the ability of the Colombian government to take some of the measures that have been recommended by the ombudsman, or that could be recommended in the future, to redress some of the issues that have been identified. That's a very specific concern, and--

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

What you're saying is that it's fine to continue without rules, but don't try to put rules in place. That's what I'm hearing you say.

With respect, I just simply don't agree with that. We may disagree—and that's fine—on how stringent the rules should be, but at least we're talking about trying, attempting, to put some rules in place.

As well, I do take some exception to your statement that no investment could be made without potential human rights abuses. Well, of course not. You can say that, and someone can listen to you say it, and believe it; it's easy to say. But, my goodness, you must have enough faith in mankind somewhere along the line to believe that every company that works abroad is not inherently evil, that every person isn't just after the almighty dollar, that actually some of them have a social conscience and are trying to do their jobs in a fair and equitable manner. Surely....

That's seven minutes. I've got one more question.

[Jamie Kneen]

Can we respond?

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

Yes, of course.

[Jamie Kneen]

I'm not in disagreement with you at all. We're not in disagreement that there should be rules in place. We're active elsewhere promoting rules around investment, human rights protection, environmental protection, and corporate and social responsibility attached to investment and trade—absolutely.

I think the point we've tried to make clearly here is that we're not attributing any specific failure of due diligence or good intentions on the part of the investors. There may or may not be. We weren't able to uncover evidence that would let us say somebody was acting badly on purpose. As I said before, if we had found that evidence, we absolutely would have brought it forward.

The reason it's particularly germane in the case of Colombia is because of the history of conflict, the layers of uncertainty, so that a company exercising what would be a normal level of due diligence, in the Colombian context, could still find itself implicated in these abuses. And that is precisely the danger we want to identify.

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

I appreciate that.

My last question is very brief, and it's to do with the actual footprint. There have been a couple of statements made, you know, about so many square kilometres, hundreds of square kilometres, thousands of square kilometres, of land being forcefully vacated—you know, forcing the people off this land—because of mining or business interests. I've been around a lot of mines across Canada and in parts of the rest of the world, and the footprint when you're doing exploration.... And you'd be familiar with this, I would expect. You may explore 100 kilometres of property, but you don't build roads over it, and you don't force people off it, and you don't get in property conflicts in every square inch of it.

Quite frankly, it's the opposite of that. You explore a large area and you develop a very tiny—often only hundreds of acres--footprint. I don't understand how you force....

In the Highland Clearances, people were forcefully expelled from their property. But that's not the case here. There's no reason to do that. So I don't understand how this occurs. If there's narco traffic, if there's illegal criminal activity, if there's something else that people are fleeing for their own personal safety, yes, that I understand.

[Jamie Kneen]

I think it's important to keep the layers in mind. We're not talking about the mining company that has purchased a lease clearing people off that land. We're talking about military or paramilitary activity, prior to that happening, that then creates a situation where you can go in and it doesn't matter where you want to explore or mine, because the area is now clear for you to move into.

Again, it's not the mining activity, per se, it's the conditions that allow the mining interests to come in.

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

I'll follow up later with some other questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

Mr. Holder.

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will share half my time, because I know Mr. Harris has a couple of quick questions.

My thanks to both of you for attending today.

I'd like to follow up on Mr. Bryson's comment. He talked about mining industries, and whether you supported the large or small. He was getting to the point of asking whether you support any mining industries.

There were a couple of things you said, Mr. Kneen, that I thought were very compelling, and I'd like to play them back to make sure that I understood them correctly.

Just a moment ago, Mr. Keddy was talking to you about trade. You have a consistent theme that I think bears repeating. You said that if you had found the evidence, you certainly would have brought it forward. I think that is very sincere, and I think it's a very honest comment.

With respect to Mr. Bryson's comments, when we talked about a direct link between Canadian mining industries, extraction industries, and violence in Colombia, I heard you say that if we had that kind of information, it would have blown up already. I believe that's what you said in your testimony.

It seems that your comments, as well-intended as I believe they are, contain lots of conjecture and much supposition. We all hope that there's more error than truth in this. If I had I received this report in advance, I would have read it in more detail and I could have responded more directly to what appear to be serious allegations.

I would like to ask you a very specific question. Do you believe there is a direct link between Canadian companies doing business in Colombia and murders and violence in Colombia?

[Jamie Kneen]

We did not find a direct link between any Canadian companies and any specific acts of violence. We did find the potential that this could be the case and we could not exclude it. And we did not find that either the actions of the Canadian government, the Canadian embassy, or the companies themselves were sufficient to preclude that association.

There are mechanisms that have been developed internationally—the voluntary principles being one—that look at the use of military and former military personnel as private security. Not all of the actors were even aware of these mechanisms; still less were they implementing them.

That, I think, is a fair summary of what we found, but the paper goes into this in much more precise detail.

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

I will make a point of reading it. In your last comments, you used the word “potential”--so once again, supposition and not clear.

Could I ask you a separate question? We have different perspectives, but I think this is fair. Most of our guests to date--in fact, all of them, I would say--support trade. They may not support a free trade agreement, per se, but they support trade. And I thought I heard some reference to that. Quite honestly, we do trade today. We do significant trade. What we're trying to do is draw the barriers down to the advantage of Canada and Colombia alike.

They also, to a person, said that they saw a need for an enforceable rules-based system. The absence of rules, as I believe Mr. Keddy was trying to suggest, ultimately leads to less fairness and potentially more chaos.

Maybe I could flip the question around. What do you see as the positive, or the upside, of increased trade with Colombia?

[Jamie Kneen]

I'm not a trade specialist, so I'll have to be careful. My organization focuses on the mining industry.

By the way, what we advocate for is responsible mining.

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

Do you believe, sir, Canadian extraction industries are corporately socially responsible?

[Jamie Kneen]

Not in all cases, unfortunately.

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

Can you give us specifics?

[Jamie Kneen]

Yes, but I think that has been the subject of discussion at another committee over the last month or two, so--

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

Is there anything you could put on the table today that would be very specific to your allegation just now? Actually, it wasn't an allegation; it was a direct comment. Do you have something specific that you could share with this committee?

[Jamie Kneen]

With the time we have available, I'm not sure it's constructive to go into details country by country, or company by company, of the cases and allegations. The linkages that have been brought forward—

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

Unfortunately, we do have limited time, and I know Mr. Harris has a couple of questions. The problem with this, as you'll appreciate, Mr. Kneen, is we've now heard another allegation. It seems spurious and feels to me that all we've done is malign Canadian companies in Colombia that are, I think in good faith, trying to do the right thing through corporate social responsibility.

They're certainly trying to make a profit, improve their corporate lives, and at the same time do some positive things in Colombia and Canada. By throwing a comment out there without a direct response, it feels to me that we've cast serious aspersions on Canadian industries in Colombia, and I think that's unfortunate.

I'll turn my time over to Mr. Harris.

[Jamie Kneen]

Sorry, your question was about the Canadian mining industry as a whole—

[Ed Holder, Conservative, London West, ON]

No, I was very specific, sir. I was very specific.

[Jamie Kneen]

I was commenting initially, and trying to be very precise, on Colombia. But if you're asking whether I think Canadian companies are acting in full corporate social responsibility all the time, I did say no. If you would like to look at the case of New Gold in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, that was just found to have been operating illegally for the last three years, I'd invite you to do so.