Mr. Chair, I'll limit myself to two minutes just to keep within the time frame.
I just want to comment on the Mining Association of Canada's suggestion that there should be a joint investigation, that is, that the mining company should be part of the investigative process. I'm going to give you an illustration of why I don't think that would work.
A Canadian mining company, in 2006, bought a mine and immediately afterwards there were widespread allegations that its personnel, employees, were involved in massive gang rapes. The mining company did not investigate. In fact, it hotly denied, angrily denied these accusations. Volunteer law students from Harvard University and from Columbia University, an NGO called MiningWatch in Canada, documented these things and they went to Barrick's AGMs and told people about this. I quote the reaction of the founder of the company from The Globe and Mail, which says:
...he said it would be impossible to police the behaviour of 5,550 employees, particularly in countries where "gang rape is a cultural habit. Of course, you can't say that because it's politically incorrect....
That was the reaction of the founder. Now, after five years of various NGOs and these law clinics bringing this to the attention of the public, this company finally decided they had to acknowledge that their employees were involved in these massive gang rapes.
What's the implication of that? A hundred women were probably gang-raped while this company was waiting to take any action. I've mentioned the company, it's Barrick, the second-largest gold company in the world at that time, based in Ontario. The person who said that was Peter Munk, who I'm sure many of you have heard about.
This is an illustration of why joint investigation doesn't work. If there had been an independent person in Canada who could say, “We don't care, Barrick, whether you want to investigate this or not. We are going to investigate this”, they would have found this out earlier. They could have stopped these gang rapes. But no, we left it up to Barrick to make their decision about when they wanted to do something about that. That is the weakness of joint investigation.
Thank you.