Sure. It stands for the International Finance Corporation Compliance Auditor/Ombudsman.
Of those 110 complaints, 80 have been perfunctorily dismissed. If you go to their homepage, it's right there: “How to file a complaint”. Anybody can complain. Anybody in the whole entire world can complain. You or I can complain right now, and there have been 110 in 10 years. It does have some weight when they come down with it. Its teeth are not quite as sharp as those of Bill C-300, but it has weight. So it's not credible at all that we're going to have billions of allegations.
Further, perhaps our colleague from SNC-Lavalin did not mean what he said, because if I heard correctly, he said that if there were allegations of wrongdoing in a project they were involved in, they would divest. I don't think that's true, because of those 110 allegations that were levelled with the International Finance Corporation CAO, I'm almost certain that SNC would have been involved in some way with a couple of those projects. I don't think allegations are enough to make companies run away, because if anyone can make an allegation and you're willing to run away from a billion-dollar investment, that just doesn't pass the smell test.
In terms of the other remarks, I think it's natural for companies to sometimes say that the sky is falling. When we had labour, safety, and environmental regulations, those claims were all made, and they all proved to be blatantly false. In the end, companies were a lot more profitable because of them. I don't think this sort of notion of Chicken Little crying the sky is falling holds a lot of water. I don't understand when people ask why they need this if their companies are leaders in the world. Why do we have labour laws and environmental laws and other standards that are backed up by legal remedies in our country? You need an accountability mechanism. Why do we have referees at the hockey game? We need somebody who can put people in the penalty box when it's needed and help to hold order.
I hope the committee doesn't take these statements that are being made too seriously. In terms of your question of how we can brand Canada as a leader, how do we differentiate ourselves as Canadians when we're operating a mining company abroad? We do have a good reputation, but it's running on fumes to some extent. I remember being in Colombia, talking to the U.S. ambassador. She told me that there was a Canadian company operating in the heartland of FARC, that a U.S. company could never operate there, and that doing so was a privilege our country's companies enjoyed. If we want to continue to enjoy that privilege, we can't just rest on our laurels. We have to have something that gives real quality assurance, and this bill would offer a good starting point of a semblance of quality assurance.
If I'm in Africa, living in a community in the Congo and something is going wrong--and maybe nothing's going wrong--at least I know that if something is going wrong, there is real due process through which someone will listen to my complaint and hear it out if it is valid. That says a lot to countries, and that sort of thing would differentiate us so people could say when you deal with Canadians--