MiningWatch Canada and OECD Watch have submitted extensive feedback to Canada’s National Contact Point as it reviews its procedures. Once again, we’ve found that the proposed changes are falling short of the much-needed reforms to that office. 

Read the full feedback to the NCP here.

Background – A history of NCP ineffectiveness and deepening harm to notifiers

Take action! Canadian mining companies and their subsidiaries are implicated in serious human rights abuses and environmental damage around the globe. Yet instead of establishing rules requiring Canadian companies to respect human rights and the environment, Canada continues to rely on voluntary measures for corporate accountability. Experience shows that voluntary measures don’t work. But there’s hope. Two new private member’s bills tabled in March 2022 could help protect people and the planet from corporate abuse — if they get enough support. Call on your Member of Parliament to take action and support Bill C-262 and C-263 today.

(May 12, 2022) An international coalition of activists delivered a petition to Pan American Silver leadership at the company’s annual meeting yesterday calling on the company to respect communities’ self-determination in Guatemala and Argentina.

Eight miners are trapped in a mine owned by a Vancouver-based company. Advocates want more accountability.

By Amanda Follett Hosgood, The Tyee

(Ottawa) The Alberta Court of Appeal today released its long-delayed opinion on the Government of Alberta’s challenge of the federal Impact Assessment Act (IAA), ruling in a four-to-one split decision that the law is unconstitutional and serves as a “Trojan Horse” to impose federal decision-making on provincial jurisdiction.

Rainwater in the landlocked country cut off access to the mine’s lower levels on April 16, and there has been no communication with the missing workers since.

By Alex Boyd, Calgary Bureau
Mon., May 9, 2022

More than three weeks since heavy rainfall cut off access to the surface, eight miners remain trapped half a kilometre underground, their status unknown, in a flooded-out zinc mine in West Africa that’s owned by a Canadian company.

We the undersigned peoples and organisations have gathered here at the first Summit of Peoples Affected by Pan American Silver in Guatemala. In a week, the company will hold its annual meeting of its shareholders in Vancouver, where the image they will present is likely to be positive. Our realities are very different, and we want our voices to be heard. This initiative arose in response to the need to articulate and exchange experiences of resistance as a way of confronting the constant threats that we suffer in our territories.

A new report by a renowned environmental lawyer concludes that British Columbia is “not yet a world leader” in its environmental reviews of proposed metal mines – despite the province’s claims to the contrary.

For close to twenty years, communities affected by proposed mining development in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina have held a standing engagement on the 4th day of every month: to march in defence of life and reiterate their commitment to uphold the results of a 2003 referendum that said ‘NO’ to industrial mining. 

In view of the repression suffered this afternoon by the neighbors of Andalgalá, who were resisting the advance of the MARA project in Choya, the organizing network of the Multi-National March for Water issues the following statement: