Bill C-300: What Happened to Good Governance?

By failing to support the responsible mining bill, Michael Ignatieff's Liberals settled for "corporate social responsibility" in place of good governance.

The author Pierre Berton once theorized that the organization of 19th-century mining camps during the Canadian and American gold rushes reflected each country's relationship with law and the role of the public sector in their respective economies.

Prospectors in California and Alaska, ever weary of authority, built and defended informal local cooperatives, and federal agents who challenged the rights of these groups to administer mineral claims and distribute justice did so at their peril. By contrast, mines in British Columbia and the Yukon Territory were, from the start, governed by uniform laws, managed by federal bureaucrats, and enforced by mounted police. “If anything, on the Canadian side there was too much government,” Berton wrote in his book Klondike, published in 1958.

Americans, the theory goes, resist imperious restrictions while Canadians accept authority in exchange for peace and order. But Wednesday's defeat of Bill C-300, the responsible mining bill, illuminates the limitations of reducing national differences to a single issue. It is now the U.S. championing the spread of good governance and Canada permitting the private sector to regulate itself.

Six votes were all that prevented C-300, a private member's bill sponsored and midwived by Liberal MP John McKay, from becoming law. If just six of 13 absent Liberals had visited the Chamber, Ottawa would have joined Washington in a legislative movement to bring effective public oversight to publicly traded Canadian mining and fossil- fuel companies operating in developing countries.

Hours before the vote in Ottawa, Senator Benjamin Cardin, the Maryland legislator who successfully passed a parallel mining-reform bill in July, lamented the imminent defeat of C-300. "We want the Canadians to help us on this," he said, speaking Oct. 27 at an extractive-industries conference I was attending at Columbia University's Vale Center on Sustainable International Investment. "I think the Liberal party is misreading this issue,” Cardin intoned.

The so-called Cardin-Lugar provision was passed into law as a rider on the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in July, after parallel initiatives by Republic senator Richard Lugar and Cardin were joined in a bipartisan effort. For Canadians, it is important to highlight that Cardin’s inspiration for the transparency reform originated in a 2007 hearing at the Helsinki Commission, the U.S. government agency – co-chaired by Cardin – that monitors compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. These Cold War-era human-rights norms entail the rational use of resources and environmental cooperation, both of which, Cardin emphasizes, depend on the presence of good governance.

In an Oct. 22 interview with me at his Baltimore office, Cardin reinforced that extractive- industries transparency reforms are an element of the Helsinki Commission's broader international objectives. "My goal is to develop good governance, respect for human rights, and [elevated] standards of living," he said, underscoring that good governance and transparency are essential to the development of secure markets. "The objective is to build stronger countries."

Canada is a party to the Helsinki Accords. Although a law passed in the U.S., even one emanating from its involvement with the accords, does not, of course, bind Canadian legislators, one imagines that Canada's progressive parties would want to harmonize our human rights progress with our Helsinki partners. Especially an opposition party led by Michael Ignatieff.

Ignatieff's refusal to vote or enforce party discipline on private member's bills is well documented, so it was no surprise when the Liberal Leader did not show up to vote on Wednesday. But it was also evident that Ignatieff did not support the bill and hoped to see it fail.