Bill C-300 is Mining for Change

Passing a private member's bill to legislate responsible mining practices is the right thing to do, ethically and economically.

International exchanges of mining expertise are among the earliest recorded forms of foreign aid and diplomacy. In antiquity, when King Solomon – ruler of the land of milk and honey, not minerals and mines – broke ground on his temple atop Jerusalem, he asked the King of Tyre to lend him a metallurgical consultant.

Meanwhile, the original conference of the kind now hosted by the UN and other international institutions was held in the Hungarian mining town of Schemnitz. According to the 19th century naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt, "The learned of every nation met at the Congress of Schemnitz" to disseminate the German method of using mercury to accelerate silver extraction.

But the first modern proponent of international mining cooperation was a Canadian civil servant, Dr. Hugh Keenleyside, who, in the late 1940s, led the infant UN's first technical assistance mission, a study of Bolivia's failing tin mines. This mission led to Keenleyside's selection as director of the Technical Assistance Administration, a long-forgotten UN bureaucracy that preceded what we now know as international development.

Among other projects during his tenure, Keenleyside pushed for his vision of global cooperation in the mining sector. But as postwar internationalism spread in scope, mining drifted from a priority to a novelty, and across the eco-humanitarian conventions from the 1960s through the 1990s, there was a consistent theme: mining got left out.

Now, 60 years after Keenleyside's cry for an ethics of extraction, we finally have Bill C-300 – the responsible mining bill.

The private member’s bill was introduced in February 2009 by Liberal MP John McKay, following five years of debate over the human rights and environmental standards of Canada's oil, gas, and mining companies operating in developing countries.

The bill is scheduled for a vote on Oct. 27. If successful, it will lay the legislative foundation for corporate responsibility in the extractive industries by creating an accessible mechanism for complaints and ensuring the Government of Canada invests public funds only in corporations that comply with environmental and human rights standards. A bill with similar objectives was signed into law in the United States in July.

However, the bill is meeting stiff resistance from people in the industry, who have voiced suspicions that the motive behind the bill is to "punish" companies.

In a discussion about this bill, McKay told me, "There’s a saying in law school: 'When you've got neither law nor facts, just pound the table.' That's what [critics of the bill] are doing – pounding the table. We could have put punitive measures in this bill, but there are no criminal sanctions or civil damages. Mining will continue as usual – we just want them to be responsible."

Canada has a bipolar international reputation, as anyone who goes to remote parts of the developing world may discover. I once traveled to Adamah, a town in southern Ethiopia, where the people say, “When there is drought in Ethiopia, pray for rain in Canada” – a reference to their appreciation for Canadian food aid. This gratitude for our provision of wheat still buys a Canadian a cup of coffee or a bolt or two of araki.

The flipside of this reputation, however, is the perception of Canadian industry – especially junior mining companies – as particularly unscrupulous.

I spent September in Colombia, where the area I was scheduled to work – a mining town still scarred by the violent chaos and massacres of 1980s and ’90s – was impassable due to the arrival of a Canadian gold mining company.

Six months earlier, the company had leased a claim in this troubled region, only to discover there were already 7,000 miners working the concession. The company's ultimatum to the miners – give up using mercury within three months (an impossible request) or get out – helped spark syndicalist protests marked by a general strike and renewed alliances with guerrillas.