“There was a time...when I was proud, while overseas, to identify myself as Canadian. It appears that this is over,” Aaron Bates wrote to Michael Ignatieff.
Bates, a Halifax resident who has worked as a nurse in Guatemala says “Canadian mines have had a measurably negative impact on the lives of those who live near them...My Canadian citizenship does not open any doors in these communities.”
Bates' outrage comes on the heels of the death of Bill C-300, a private member's bill that would have regulated how Canadian mining companies operate overseas. There are currently no regulations on how Canadian companies operate, except for a system of 'corporate social responsibility' run by the companies themselves and supported in small part by the Canadian government.
He joins a collection of Nova Scotian activists and NGOs who lobbied for the bill and have since blasted its defeat at the hands of the Conservatives, with help from the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois MPs who missed or abstained from the vote.
Many of the most vocal activists are those who have visited the sites where they say Canadian companies have ignored basic human rights and environmental concerns.
“Our responsibility is to be in solidarity with our friends and colleagues in Guatemala.” Says Kathryn Anderson, founder of Breaking the Silence, a Nova Scotia group committed to making partnerships with Guatemalans organizations dedicated to social justice and developments. As Canadians, she says, we have a “responsibility to respond” to those affected by our country's extractive industries.
Ecumenical justice group KAIROS has also been vocal on the issue of Canadian extractive issues abroad. Linda Scherzinger, an activist with the Halifax chapter of the group, blasted the government, saying that the Canadian foreign service works “not in support of the indigenous people who organize against the mining companies.”
“Whenever we go to Guatemala and meet with Canadian officials in the embassies, it's very obvious where their loyalties lay,” she says.
KAIROS recently had its funding proposal rejected by the federal government for the first time in over a decade, seemingly at the last minute. Some have suggested that their high-profile opposition to the voluntary regulation system is the reason. Scherzinger, in part, agrees, “The truth is that most of the issues that KAIROS works on are in opposition to the current government.” She says.
KAIROS, however, has no plans to stop its work. Ian Thomson, Program Coordinator for Ecological Justice and Corporate Accountability, says that KAIROS will continue to speak up wherever the countries of the Global south are “getting sucked into a foreign investment based economy. Where the wealth is being exported to foreign stock exchanges such as the TSX.”
