Let me first highlight that I believe we have come to an important consensus with industry. The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada notes that many countries lack the governance and institutional capacity to enforce legislation and to ensure a stable regulatory regime. However, industry's response to this governance gap is to focus on voluntary CSR measures to be taken by corporations, supported by host country capacity-building to be undertaken by northern hemisphere countries like Canada.
Remarkably, this line of argument appears to support a position that extractive industries should remain exempt from effective legal and regulatory mechanisms, at least until the Government of Canada and other northern hemisphere countries have created sufficient capacity to regulate and provide legal accountability in all weak governance and conflict zones around the world where PDAC and its members choose to operate.
Voluntary CSR approaches by extractive companies, while necessary, are not sufficient to ensure respect of human rights and environments by corporations. They do not, for example, deal with the problem of laggards, companies that choose not to apply CSR standards, or apply them inconsistently and not uniformly across all operations. Another key problem with existing CSR codes and instruments is that they are all weak on human rights, referencing only a subset of human rights, if at all. Another key deficit of voluntary CSR instruments, and this is identified by Ruggie, the UN special representative, is that no CSR instruments have effective accountability mechanisms, particularly with respect to sanction and remedy.
If we can agree that there is a governance gap in many host countries in which our corporations operate, and that voluntary CSR measures, while necessary, are not sufficient, and if we recognize that there is no international regulatory system that can deal with corporate abuses in weak governance zones, nor is there an international legal system to which aggrieved parties can turn, then we must come to the conclusion that it is only the home state of multinationals, home states such as Canada, that can address the governance gap identified by Ruggie.
I'll leave it at that. I would say this conclusion is a conclusion this committee came to in 2005 with the report that was issued at that time. It's also a conclusion that 137 members of Parliament must have come to when they voted in favour of Bill C-300 in the House of Commons on April 22.
Thank you.