Thank you for inviting me to say a few words to celebrate The Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP)’s latest ground breaking report: The ‘Canada Brand’ in Africa – Human Rights and Environmental Conflict in Extractive Industries.
I would like to start by extending enthusiastic congratulations to Professors Sara Ghebremusse and Shin Imai and the dedicated JCAP team they assembled to bring us this report. Together, they ploughed through decades’ worth of data, to summarize some 34 cases covering 7 categories of human and environmental rights violations involving 23 Canadian extractive companies across 17 African countries over a 30-year time span.
There is a reason a report of this scale and scope —as urgently needed as it is—has not been compiled until now. It is a daunting task that could only be accomplished through dogged determination, and many long days over multiple years.
Those of us in Canada, and globally, who work in solidarity with communities and Indigenous peoples bearing the brunt of rights violations by Canadian extractive companies - and who are committed to changing the systemic conditions that enable these harms - are hugely grateful to JCAP for bringing this vital report across the finish line!
There is no doubt that this report will be frequently mobilized to drive change - as this has been demonstrated by JCAP’s 2016 report The “Canada Brand”: Violence and Canadian Mining Companies in Latin America. That report clearly shows a systemic pattern of documented mining-related violence across multiple Latin countries and Canadian mining companies. This has an impact that reports on singular cases cannot achieve. A decade after its release, it remains a yearly go-to report for MiningWatch as we prepare briefs for UN bodies, presentations for parliamentary committees, and peer reviewed academic papers.
The Canada Brand’s African version has expanded the scope from mining related violence, to include six other categories of human rights and environmental violations.
I want to highlight a few entrenched narratives that a report of this scope is uniquely positioned to challenge.
First is a pattern of denial followed by delayed acknowledgement. All too often, when industry actors and government officials are confronted with allegations of ongoing harm in a specific case, the immediate response is skepticism or outright denial. Over time, this may shift from denial to a revisionist "that was then, this is now" stance—belatedly acknowledging past harms while insisting that current practices have fundamentally improved. This revisionism is applied to individual cases, as well as to a narrative about progressive improvements in the sector as a whole. The 30-year scope of The Canada Brand’s African edition reveals that human rights and environmental violations are endemic and “business as usual” in the sector—persistent over decades, ongoing today, and yet to be effectively addressed by Canadian governments.
Second is the "few bad apples" narrative—the claim that while a handful of rogue actors may exist, the mining industry as a whole operates responsibly. By covering 23 Canadian extractive companies implicated in serious harms, the scope of this report highlights a much broader problem than one caused by just a few bad actors.
Finally, the report shatters the "lack of capacity" narrative. It is often argued that smaller exploration or junior companies may lack the resources or expertise to meet high international standards. However, because JCAPs research covers companies of all sizes—up to the very largest Canadian multinationals —it demonstrates that serious rights violations and breaches of international standards are, in fact, systemic across the Canadian extractive sector.
This report launches amid one of the largest mining booms we have seen in 30 years. This surge is driven in part by escalating geopolitical tensions among global super powers leading to aggressive competition for so-called "critical minerals," which are required for modern defense systems and for high-tech manufacturing of products such as semiconductors, microchips, and magnets.
The mining sector is also benefitting from global economic instability, causing Canada, to double down on domestic and overseas mining in an effort to bolster its own economy – this in spite of analysis by MiningWatch and others that questions the efficacy of this economic strategy.
And the current mining boom is fueled by another existential crisis, the climate emergency, which has galvanized global support for extracting the metals required for technology for the energy transition away from fossil fuels.
Finally, rising global conflicts have pushed gold—not a critical mineral—to historic highs of over $4,000 USD an ounce. This has triggered a profit-driven global expansion in gold mining, a sector heavily represented among the human rights and environmental violations documented in JCAP’s report.
In a context in which financial and political support for the mining sector is strongly endorsed by the Canadian government, we are witnessing a steady erosion of decades of hard-fought for gains in environmental regulations and human rights protections. Canada’s retreat from reining in harmful mining impacts overseas is starkly illustrated by the closure of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) this year.
As governments hail mining as a solution for existential threats while downplaying the severe human rights and environmental impacts of unbridled extractivism, it is even harder than usual for the voices of the victims of unrestrained mining to be heard. In this hostile climate, the rigorous, evidence-based documentation contained in JCAP’s report serves an essential function in bearing witness to these systemic harms.
Further to the importance of bearing witness, I want to say a few words about one of the cases in the report in particular - one with which I am most directly familiar. This is the case of the North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania. Reports date back to at least 2008 of serious human rights violations endured by local Kuria villagers surrounding the mine related to allegations of excess use of force by mine security. MiningWatch started to carry out yearly human rights field assessments in 2014. Over nine visits to the area between 2014 and 2024 I carried out 88 in-depth interviews with credible victims of alleged shootings, beatings, torture and rape, or with family members of those who had died as a result of these assaults by the mine’s private security or by police contracted to the mine. The most recent of these cases we documented were from 2023 and 2024. Although we reported out on our findings yearly, engaged the company involved, Barrick Mining, as well as Canadian officials, shareholders and UN officials, the allegations of security-related human rights abuses continued.
Last month I was a witness for two Kuria plaintiffs in a novel case filed by the UK law firm Leigh Day before the royal high court in London. The plaintiffs, family members of young men allegedly killed by mine police, allege that the London Bullion Market Association wrongly certified that a gold refiner that sourced gold from the North Mara mine met the London Bullion Market Association’s standard for ensuring that the gold it refined was “conflict-free,” this in spite of widespread and long-term public allegations of human rights abuses at the mine.
This case raises questions about the effectiveness of industry-associated certification systems and confidential third party audits for addressing human rights abuses. It also raises questions about the burgeoning role of such private sector schemes, which are favoured by industry, over government regulation and unhindered access to courts in the home countries of companies accused of human rights abuses overseas.
Lawsuits, like the one currently unfolding in London, often follow public reporting on local abuses, for example by media or organizations such as MiningWatch. Without this reporting these serious ongoing rights violations would remain hidden and unaddressed. In recent years, I have seen journalists silenced by their own editorial boards and activist groups threatened with SLAPP suits. I have also witnessed local human rights defenders face direct threats to their lives, and governments mobilized to block access to local people in order to suppress evidence of human rights violations. This is currently happening in Tanzania and has been taken up in JCAP’s report.
In this context of support by many global political leaders for a new mining boom, together with widespread silencing of the voices of local victims of human rights and environmental violations by Canadian extractive companies operating overseas, JCAP’s report is not only ambitious, but also courageous and vital.
Thank you.