Editorial: Bill C-300 still flawed

Canada’s mining industry spent a rare week under the national media’s heat lamps in late November, as many reporters rallied to support the anti-mining Bill C-300, which is sponsored by backbench federal Liberal member of parliament John McKay, and is once again before committee in Ottawa.

Bill C-300 would give the ministers of foreign affairs and international trade new responsibility to hold Canadian resource companies accountable for their practices in developing countries by submitting annual reports to the House of Commons and Senate for review.

The ministries could then sanction delinquent companies by withdrawing or withholding project funding from arms such as Export Development Canada and the Canada Pension Plan.

The progressive Toronto Star kicked off the miner bashing with a front-page feature that essentially rehashed stories on Copper Mesa Mining’s (formerly Ascendant Copper) ham-fisted community relations in Ecuador in 2006 and Anvil Mining’s deadly Kilwa incident in 2004 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for which the company was cleared in 2007.

The paper tried to extrapolate these two incidents to claim Canadian miners have a bad reputation around the world.

(That a Star reporter with a hate-on for miners could only dig up such old examples of poor community relations, and that the two companies involved were actually American and Australian speaks to just how good the record of Canadian miners overseas really is, overall.)

Meanwhile, the taxpayer-funded and left-leaning Canadian Broadcasting Corp. predictably chimed in with stories bearing headlines like “Gold miners oppose rules on overseas operations” — giving the impression our miners are now operating in other countries without any regulations at all.

The peak came on Nov. 26, when Canada’s biggest gold miners and their supporters testified before the committee, and tried to fight back against salacious allegations made against them during previous weeks’ testimonies by anti-mining activists protected from slander charges by parliamentary privilege.

Our view hasn’t changed from the spring: Bill C-300 is a solution in search of a problem, because Canadian mining companies generally behave very well in the developing world.

And if they don’t, the host countries certainly have the bureaucratic and technical muscle to bring them into line. To suggest they don’t have this regulatory capacity is one more example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” to use George W. Bush’s phrase.

If the bill becomes law, the two federal ministers overseeing it will be deluged with complaints from hyper-politicized enviro-kooks and cranks from around the world, and will simultaneously be incapable of properly investigating the validity of any wild claims flooding in from remote places on the other side of the planet.