Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to the members of this committee for providing us this opportunity to speak to you today. In 2008, John Ruggie, the United Nations special representative on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprise

Foreign Affairs committee  Maybe what I'll do is I'll skip over the further cases I have and just come to my concluding remarks.

Foreign Affairs committee  Let me first highlight that I believe we have come to an important consensus with industry. The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada notes that many countries lack the governance and institutional capacity to enforce legislation and to ensure a stable regulatory regim

Foreign Affairs committee  I was one of the members of the advisory group, so I helped shape the context of the round tables; I participated in all of the round tables and was very much involved in the drafting of the final report, which we signed on to. In that context, I would like to say that one of th

Foreign Affairs committee  Let me answer that question this way. If the government had actually honoured and respected the consensus recommendations that came out of the round table process, I would be very comfortable in going forward in a process that reflected those recommendations and said, let's wait

Foreign Affairs committee  If I could answer on both the question you posed to me and this question, just briefly—but I will put it in my brief in more detail—if we're just looking at the issues of sanction and remedy, this bill does not deal with remedy. What we ultimately will need in Canada at one point

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I have lived and worked with environmental and human rights defenders affected by Canadian mining companies in the Philippines since 1988 and in the last 22 years with MiningWatch Canada as Asia-Pacific program coordinator. I first testified before this committee in 2005, toget

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, I want to briefly say that when we think about the situation that has just been described to us, we see that Canada intersects in this reality in the Philippines in at least two ways: through our embassy, which is not doing enough to protect people, even people who come to t

International Trade committee  Thank you. Since 1999, MiningWatch Canada has been working with mining-affected communities and indigenous peoples struggling to protect their human rights and their environment from egregious impacts and abuses by Canadian mining companies operating in Africa, Latin America and

International Trade committee  MiningWatch Canada was a member of the MSAB in a back-up position.

International Trade committee  Thank you for that question. Yes, that's going back a ways. I think it's a very important question, because in 2018, the Government of Canada made a commitment, in the creation of the Canadian ombudsperson for responsible enterprise, that this officer would have the investigator

International Trade committee  I don't know if it was put in for political reasons, but what I do know is that when we participated in that body, it became very clear very quickly that the issues that really needed to be dealt with—the fact that the CORE needed to have the powers that she needed, the fact that

International Trade committee  It was definitely a broken promise. It was more than a promise; it was a commitment. This was actually publicly stated by the Government of Canada. At that time the minister was François-Philippe Champagne, and the commitment was made very publicly. In fact, when the commitment

International Trade committee  Let me just answer two things. First of all, in my presentation I gave an awful lot of a variety of both environmental and human rights issues and I named many countries. All of those have actual cases behind them, and we will be providing a brief with far more information. Ye

International Trade committee  No. We do not believe she does, because she still does not have the powers, five years after her office was created, to compel witnesses and compel documents. That was something that the Government of Canada recognized as critically important, and it committed that she would have