MiningWatch and others have documented some of this in detail, as the history of Canadian mining companies in the third world has, regrettably, a long and tragic litany of trampling on the human rights of indigenous peoples and environmental devastation. Most recently, five people were fatally shot at Barrick Gold Corporation's North Mara Mine in Tanzania. Allegations have surfaced regarding sexual abuse at this operation. Barrick Gold Corporation actually reports finding “credible evidence” that its security guards and Tanzanian police sexually assaulted local women.
Back home in Canada, the threat of legal action from Barrick Gold Corporation has forced Vancouver-based Talonbooks to postpone the publication of a book about the Canadian mining industry. The book, Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World's Mining Industries, was to be published in the spring of 2010. But in February the publisher and everyone else involved with the book got a threatening letter from Barrick Gold Corporation, and didn't publish that book.
I think Canadian mining companies, frankly, enjoy impunity virtually everywhere they go and operate overseas. Many governments are unable or unwilling to effectively regulate these transnational companies. Frankly, they have the power even in our own country. If you want to look around at Vale Inco, who just got slapped very hard by the Ontario Labour Relations Board for their behaviour in Sudbury, and Rio Tinto, who locked out workers in Montreal and will soon probably lock out workers in British Columbia, they now have more power than nation-states. They are huge multinational corporations. If they don't like the rules or anything the government says to them, they just pack up and leave to go somewhere else. We would argue—and we've argued for a long time—that we recognize that corporations have neither the heart to bleed, nor the bottom to kick. That's the job of governments and politicians like you.