COMMENTARY – Canada must fight for fairness

Increasingly, Canadians are seeing product bans that discriminate against our mineral exports. The impact on metals markets is serious and is already being felt.

Banning, labeling or imposing restrictions on products that truly impose unacceptable risks, be they health or environmental, is absolutely correct. We are strongly committed to improving environmental performance and meeting sound health standards. We should not, however, let inconsistent environmental and health rules become trade barriers of the future. A careful review of recent actions in Europe reveals their arbitrary nature. For example, the European Union is trying to block imports of electrical and electronic equipment containing lead solder, and nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries.

These actions appear to contravene obligations under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as the current Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement. Any supposed health-based rationale is spurious — solder and ni-cad batteries account for negligible amounts of lead in the European environment.

These issues were raised under the umbrella that they pose unacceptable health risks. We all know that we do not live in a risk-free world. There are acceptable ways of managing these risks without banning products. To highlight the hypocrisy, Europe has been slow to ban lead in gasoline. It is also interesting to note that the European Commission has not proposed bans on the less recyclable and more expensive lithium-ion, and European-manufactured, nickel metal hydride batteries.

Industry and government must work together to address threats to market access. This means helping to provide manufacturers and consumers with the best information available about our products, their relative risks and how they can be used safely. It’s often difficult for us to monitor and influence the final use of our products, but if we don’t do it, no one else will.

As Canada’s delegation heads to Seattle for the next round of WTO negotiations, we will be urging the federal government to pursue more stringent national and international standards for technical barriers to trade.

— The preceding is an excerpt of a speech delivered by the author to mining professionals at Toronto’s Empire Club.