Thank you, Mr. Chair and panel.
Good morning. Thank you for the invitation to speak today about this very important private member's bill.
My name is Stephen Hunt. I'm the elected leader of the United Steelworkers, District 3, which is all of western Canada, from the Manitoba border west to the Pacific Ocean and the it involves primarily the extractive industries.
We represent many, many miners, forest workers, and people who work in the oil and gas industry. Many of those people I've just identified would be affected directly by Bill C-300.
Before I begin, I want to tell you where I came from. I joined the steelworkers union as a very young man and worked at Utah mines, an open-pit copper mine at the north end of Vancouver Island. I also worked at Afton mine, a mine owned by Teck Corporation, outside of Kamloops, British Columbia.
I have been closely linked to the mining sector for about 30 years, primarily in health and safety practices in the mining industry. I've travelled extensively offshore to visit Canadian mining operations. I've worked in Peru to help miners fight the new disease of silicosis in Peru. It's something that we eradicated in Canada years ago, but it's now developing in Canadian-owned mines in Peru. I've travelled to Chile to work with miners at Canadian-owned companies who are exposed to high altitudes and suffer terribly from high-altitude diseases.
Also, I'm acquainted with a Canadian mining company in this connection: I was an expert witness in the Westray inquiry. I testified and gave evidence as to why the explosion happened at the Westray coal mine in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, where 26 miners died instantly. Eleven miners are still trapped underground. Their bodies were never recovered. A Canadian mining company....
As you know, the Westray inquiry led to rank-and-file lobbying by the steelworkers to make changes to the Criminal Code of Canada to strengthen it and incorporate corporate responsibility with respect to health and safety when it comes to workplace injury and death.
Now that you know who I am, it will come as no surprise to you that I support Bill C-300 and I support mining, because we represent workers in the mining industry. By definition, that's who pays my bills.
We often refer to ourselves as Canada's mining union. We care about the industry. We care about how well our employers uphold our rights. That's why we have collective bargaining in the first place and why we care about how those same employers uphold rights of workers in communities in developing countries.
But just as we don't think companies should operate here without the balance of collective bargaining to protect rights, nor do we think companies should operate in other countries without formal checks and balances on their treatment of workers, communities, and the environment. We believe that workers' rights are human rights, and that's the context of our support of Bill C-300.
I have one more note about myself. I have been certified by the DeGroote School of Business as a chartered director. I'm qualified to sit on corporate boards in the United States and Canada. The role of these boards has expanded in the 21st century to include not only the interests of shareholders, but those of stakeholders as well. That means workers, communities, and defenders of the environment must be included in the sphere of corporate decision-making.
The steelworkers did not suddenly wake up and discover that there was a Bill C-300. The steelworkers union participated in the national round tables on corporate social responsibility that were carried out in 2006. We anticipated that the Government of Canada would take the consensus report of 27 recommendations and establish a stronger regulatory framework to hold Canadian companies accountable for human rights, labour rights, and environmental protections in their operations in developing countries.
It was not to be. It took almost two years and the government response was as if the round tables had never happened.
The so-called corporate social responsibility, or CSR, strategy was a slide backwards to voluntary corporate self-regulation by corporations, and it suggested that weak host governments in developing countries, not corporate behaviour, are at the root of the problems in the extractive sector.
Mining and oil and gas companies are the face of Canada abroad. They gain further credibility and identity as part of official Canadian policy through the co-financing they enjoy from the Export Development Corporation and the support they receive from Team Canada missions and local Canadian embassy facilities.
Yet, when steelworker members employed in the mining and mineral processing carry out labour exchanges in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, South Africa, and Guatemala, we find a huge disparity between the corporate behaviour of these companies at home and their corporate behaviour abroad.
Our union has negotiated long and hard to establish decent wages and pensions, safe workplaces through joint health and safety initiatives, and environmental measures to protect surrounding communities. The companies claim to take these best practices with them when they go to developing countries, but our experience on the ground shows differently.
Our members employed by Teck, for example, have worked for several years with union members from Teck-owned mines in Chile and Peru. These miners work at operations typically located at 4,000 metres above sea level. Despite an abundance of readily available research studies on the long-term effects of working at altitude and the constant lobbying by worker representatives in both Chile and Peru, Teck refuses to recognize the long-term exposure to high altitude as an industrial disease. Practical solutions are ignored or they are declared too expensive. These conditions mean workers suffer from headaches, loss of appetite, and an inability to sleep. Exposure leads to significantly increased risk of heart attack and pulmonary and cerebral edema. There is no compensation for workers unable to work to retirement, leaving them unable to provide support for their families. We oftentimes call that “economic blackmail” or “economic heroin”, where workers work because they have to work and they have no choice.
While Canadian companies continue to resist protection for high-altitude workers, Export Development Canada has supported the Antamina mine in Peru with $650 million in political risk insurance.
Earlier this year, in Argentina, the United Steelworkers received a request for solidarity action in response to the unjust dismissal by Barrick Gold Corporation of Jose Vicente Leiva, a labour leader at Barrick's Veladero mine. It received $75 million in project financing from Export Development Canada in 2004 and $125 million political risk insurance. Veladero is another high-altitude operation, where workers live in tents without winter gear, while temperatures can reach minus 20 degrees Celsius. Rock slides are a regular occurrence, and two workers were killed in 2006.
Mr. Leiva travelled down 4,600 metres to meet Barrick management with a list of proposals to improve safety practices, and he was told to come back in a week for an answer. He returned, only to be met by management, reinforced by Argentinian officials, with no willingness to address the issues.
Backed by an Argentinian law allowing free association, Mr. Leiva and the other Barrick workers set out to form a new independent union and sought affiliation with the Argentine workers centre, the CTA. Even before the application for recognition was fully processed, Mr. Leiva received notice from Barrick that he was terminated without cause. The cause was that Mr. Leiva and his members had exercised their rights and contested unfair practices at the Barrick mine. Mr. Leiva was recently reinstated, not through any sudden epiphany on the part of Barrick, but because national and international pressure was brought to bear.
The story of Jose Leiva and his members once again proves the adage that we have turned to time and time again as we have fought for dignity and safety in Canadian mines: a mining company is only as good as its opposition. Without a tool like Bill C-300, there are no checks, no balances, and only a fiduciary mandate.
The fact that our mining companies have gone abroad has prompted us to go global as a union. We have followed our managers to countries like South Africa, Chile, and Nicaragua. We are building global networks with workers who share common transnational employers.
The knowledge we have gained of corporate practices and labour conditions in other countries is helping us as we deal with the new challenges brought by foreign ownership in mines in Canada. Yesterday’s mining giants, like Inco, Falconbridge, and Noranda are now replaced by companies like Vale Inco and Xstrata. Three of Vale’s four nickel operations in Canada have been on strike for more than three months, fighting back as this company tries to introduce two-tier wages and a much weaker pension plan.
Bill C-300 is neither punitive nor restrictive for extractive companies. It simply provides a transparent framework for accountability and can only be invoked when violations become apparent. It refers to internationally recognized standards and ensures that financial and diplomatic assistance is contingent on good corporate behaviour. It is a social contract that allows companies to prosper and thrive, but not with an absolute lack of scrutiny by Canadian taxpayers, who are facilitating their offshore activities.
I want to thank you for the opportunity this morning, and I obviously would really like to answer your questions.
