Contemporary Forms of Slavery and the Canadian Mining Industry:

In recent years, the use of slave labour has been alleged in the operations of Canadian mining companies, their subsidiaries or contractors – for instance, in Eritrea, in the case of the company Nevsun Resources Ltd., and in Xinjiang, China, in the cases of alleged use of slave labour by Uyghurs by the mining companies GobiMin and Dynasty Gold Corp. [...] Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise: In the case of recent allegations of slave labour in regard to the mining company GobiMin in Xinjiang, the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE), a non-judicial and voluntary mechanism, decided this month “to provide recommendations to GobiMin on their responsible business conduct abroad.” And in the case of allegations of slave l. [...] Subsequently, the NCP complied with apparent demands by the company’s legal team to remove a final statement in the case, which had been posted to the NCP’s site for 10 months and which exposed some of the transgressive behaviours of the company. [...] 2) Strengthen the mandate of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) by providing the Ombudsperson with the investigatory powers to summon witnesses and require companies to hand over documents, as originally committed to by the Government of Canada. [...] (...) “it was highlighted to the Working Group that the lack of confidence of civil society in the National Contact Point was apparent, which might have limited the number of cases brought before it.” 6 In the 2019 peer review report on Canada’s NCP, the NCPs peers found that: “The NCP has been making various efforts to respond to learnings and improve its functioning in recent years.