Thank you.
Members of the committee, it is a great honour to appear before you today to talk about the legal problems that Bill C-300 causes.
The international law and fairness issues that I will discuss today are set out in more detail in a written submission that we prepared at the request of the PDAC that and will be distributed to members of this committee later this week.
From my perspective as an international lawyer, Bill C-300 will do more harm than good to the worthwhile causes that it seeks to promote. That's because it suffers from three fundamental legal flaws that cannot be remedied by minor amendments.
First, the bill will hamstring the ability of the Canadian government to promote Canadian values abroad because it will be seen by developing countries as an interference into areas that are their exclusive jurisdiction under international law.
Second, the obligations in the bill are so vague that they will create a high degree of legal uncertainty for Canadian mining, oil, and gas companies.
Third, the bill lacks guarantees for even a minimum level of procedural fairness for the companies that will be accused of wrongdoing. That is a problem that, as I will explain, is inherent in a private member's bill, which cannot allocate funds to provide the necessary level of procedural fairness. This uncertainty and lack of procedural fairness will deter even the most responsible Canadian companies from investing abroad. That deterrence of foreign investment harms not only the Canadian economy, but developing countries as well.
Let me begin with how the bill will make it harder for the Canadian government to promote Canadian values abroad.
It's important to understand here that the issue is not one of voluntary or mandatory standards. The voluntary CSR guidelines that PDAC and other groups have developed are intended to complement rather than substitute for mandatory legal standards. Rather, the issue is about who should decide what the mandatory legal requirements should be. Should it be the governments of the states where the activities are actually taking place, or should it be a government thousands of miles away?
The underlying assumption behind Bill C-300 is that all developing countries, as they are defined in the bill, suffer from a legal void in terms of environmental, labour, or human rights rules. That assumption is simply incorrect. As you'll see in my written submission, every relevant jurisdiction for Canadian mining companies has detailed laws and regulations to hold corporations accountable in these areas, laws that are usually drafted with the help of UN agencies or international financial institutions.
What proponents of Bill C-300 are really doing is asking the Government of Canada to pass judgment on how other countries are enforcing their own laws. At the same time, Bill C-300 doesn't distinguish between governments that have the capacity to enforce their own laws and those that don't. So for example, in testimony before this committee that I've seen, disputes in democracies such as Chile and Argentina have been lumped together with disputes in conflict zones that are emerging from civil war.
We all agree that some developing countries could benefit from assistance in building their enforcement capacities, which is something the Canadian government has agreed to provide them with. The question, however, is whether we should ignore a developing country's own enforcement decisions simply because of Canadian ownership of a corporation in its territory. Under international law the answer to that question is no. With limited exceptions, Canada's Parliament and its government agencies cannot exercise jurisdiction outside of Canadian territory. These limits arise from the very foundation of the international legal order, which is respect for state sovereignty.
On other occasions, I've heard Mr. McKay suggest that Bill C-300 avoids any extraterritorial jurisdiction because it merely imposes conditions on Canadian government assistance. If this were so, the bill would be redundant, because as you've heard this morning, CPP and other government agencies do set conditions and do screen the assistance that they provide, but the heart of this bill sets standards and calls for investigations of companies that may not receive a single penny of government assistance. Furthermore, these companies do not even meet the definition of a Canadian company under international law.
Bill C-300's violation of international law is exactly the same as what Canada protested when the United States tried to regulate Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. companies that trade with Cuba. We even passed laws, under the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act, blocking these companies from complying with those directions.
Imagine, if you will, what would happen if the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil or his representative were to show up in Canada one day, start examining witnesses in Sudbury, for example, hold hearings there, and then put pressure on a Brazilian shareholder of a Canadian mining company to close his operations because they don't comply with that minister's view of appropriate environmental standards. I don't think Canadians would view that as an appropriate exercise of Brazil's jurisdiction.
This breach of international law will make the promotion of human rights and the environment by our own diplomats much more difficult. It will be hard for us to be listened to if we're seen as being selective in our own application of international law.
Let me turn to some of the specific problems with the way the bill imposes rules on Canadian mining, oil, or gas companies. Bill C-300 doesn't actually set out what those rules are going to be. Rather, it directs the ministers to develop standards based on two types of documents.
First, you have more than 260 pages of voluntary guidelines that cover just about every aspect of corporate conduct. Now, these are valuable and important documents, but they were not drafted with the intention of being binding legal rules. They were supposed to be guidelines that help management make better business decisions. That means they're not written in accordance with legislative conventions and they lack the clarity and specificity that you normally see in legislation.
To give you an example of this, it's like the difference between a manual on safe driving put out by a driving school and the Highway Traffic Act. The manual on safe driving is a very useful, important document, and it helps people to be better drivers, but it won't have the clear rules and definitions that you usually see when legal penalties are being applied.
The second set of documents incorporated into the bill is made up of international human rights conventions to which Canada is a party. These rules are indeed binding legal rules, but they're designed to be binding on states, not on private persons. As a result, they have no clear meaning when they are applied to corporations. It's as if, overnight, the Canadian Charter of Rights was extended from governments to private citizens. If that happened, there would be a great deal of uncertainty as to what exactly was the meaning of the obligations that were being imposed.
When you take standards that are designed for one purpose and simply transpose them into another area, you raise a whole host of questions about their meaning. This bill therefore makes every Canadian mining, oil, and gas corporation operating in developing countries, no matter how responsibly run, a target for costly and unpredictable investigations.
Finally, because it is a private member's bill and cannot create any new offices, the bill lacks the procedural fairness safeguards that must accompany any ministerial investigation into alleged wrongdoing. For example, in the Canadian Human Rights Act, we create a Human Rights Commission to examine complaints, and then an independent Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to hold hearings into whether standards have been violated. Bill C-300 is completely silent on all of these elements of procedural fairness, because including those in the bill would render it out of order.
Having said that, I note that even if this type of administrative tribunal were created, it would still expose Canadian companies to the stigma of government investigations and second-guess good faith decisions by Canadian agencies and diplomats. This is completely different from the non-governmental bodies that were recommended by the advisory group report following the national round tables on corporate social responsibility.
We've already had some experience with this type of plaintiff diplomacy, and it hasn't worked very well. A Canadian company, Talisman, was sued in the United States based on nothing more than the fact that it paid royalties to the Government of Sudan and upgraded infrastructure. After several years of litigation, that complaint was thrown out of court because of lack of evidence. By that time, the damage was already done. After enduring the adverse publicity generated by the legal complaint, Talisman sold its interests. The ultimate dismissal of the complaint went virtually unnoticed by the media and the cause of corporate social responsibility was hardly advanced by the new owners.
Bill C-300 creates very similar risks. Indeed, witnesses appearing before this committee have already alleged that simply by paying royalties to bad governments or by building roads that can be used by government forces, Canadian companies are committing human rights violations abroad. If this is a standard to be applied, no Canadian company can avoid being investigated, and that will mean that many worthwhile projects will not go forward. That's not just bad for Canada, it's bad for developing countries as well.
Thank you.