Mehmet Tohti, the executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, in Ottawa on April 6.Ashley Fraser/Globe and Mail
The watchdog set up by the federal government to probe corporate wrongdoing abroad is slow, ineffective and has created a process bogged down in bureaucracy, say two of the groups whose complaints sparked the office’s first active cases.
The complaints, all filed in April, 2022, alleged that 12 companies in the clothing industry in Canada sold products made in whole or in part with forced labour in China, and that two mining companies also in China had operations linked with forced labour. A coalition of 28 advocacy groups filed the complaints to the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise – known as the CORE – an office tasked with looking into human-rights abuse allegations linked to Canadian companies operating outside its borders.
Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Ottawa-based Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, who is one of the lead complainants in these cases, says the process has been hampered by “unnecessary” confidentiality rules, along with a failure so far to conduct an investigation into the issues raised.
“I am full of anger and frustration with the CORE, to be honest. As you can see, it is almost a year. And I didn’t hear anything from CORE in terms of a tangible result – it is a lot of bureaucratic processes,” he said in an interview.
In response to The Globe and Mail’s questions about the complaints, the CORE said it is “unable to directly comment on individual cases” because of confidentiality reasons. The CORE has also made no one available for interviews after requests over several months.
The CORE, opened in 2019, has a mandate to review corporate conduct in three sectors: mining, petroleum and the garment industry.
A Globe investigation, published last week, has found that the office has yet to complete a single investigation. Many NGOs, which had originally supported the creation of an office that could probe allegations of human-rights abuses, now say they’re discouraging the people they work with from filing complaints with the CORE.
The federal government had initially pledged to empower the CORE with investigatory powers such as the ability to compel the production of documents, but ultimately did not grant the office those powers when the office was launched. In fact, the CORE has no ability to force companies to take any specific actions.
In total, the CORE is currently handling 15 complaints, ombudsperson Sheri Meyerhoffer told MPs in a standing committee meeting in February. Thirteen of those are the ones in China, in the Xinjiang region, which were originally filed as one single complaint, but at the CORE’s request, were separated. Another complaint, filed in November, alleges abuse of the right to a living wage by two Canadian companies operating in Bangladesh. The CORE has not provided details about the last complaint, saying that it would release information about it later this month. All of these complaints, the CORE told The Globe in March, are still in the “initial assessment stage.”
Hugh Doherty, co-chair of the group Canadians in Support of Refugees in Dire Need, was also part of the coalition that filed the complaints last April. He said the length of time the CORE has taken so far amounts to “bureaucratic nonsense.”
“There is no sense of urgency,” he said, which he finds striking given the gravity of the situation in the region. “Why is it so difficult to cut through the red tape and get to the matter at hand and do something?” he asked.
Under the CORE’s mandate, the office can offer mediation between parties, and launch a review or investigation based on the complaint. The office can recommend consequences for companies that don’t co-operate – such as the withdrawal of trade services or Export Development Canada financing – although to date, it appears it has not done so.
Mr. Tohti said he prefers an investigation to mediation; if the CORE doesn’t have the resources to investigate the situation itself, he said, the office could outsource a study to an independent third party.
He also notes that much of the information about the alleged abuses in China are already in the public domain, from independent think tanks, media reports and in U.S. congressional reports.
Several organizations have urged the federal government to ban the import of products from China’s Xinjiang province in protest over the treatment of Uyghurs and other minority Muslim communities, who have been allegedly forced to work in factories and on farms.
In 2022, a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said allegations of forced labour, deaths in custody and torture, may amount to “crimes against humanity.” China has denied these allegations.
The companies initially named in the complaints are well-known brands, including Costco Canada, Walmart Canada Corp. and Lululemon Canada.
Last week , The Globe reached out to the companies named for comment on the process and only four involved in the complaints filed last April responded.
One of those was Dynasty Gold Corp., whose chief executive Ivy Chong said the CORE “didn’t do its homework”; it believes the complaint against it is inadmissible, as it says its mineral exploration operation ended in China more than a decade ago and falls outside of the CORE’s time frame for which a complaint is allowed. (The CORE did not respond to a question on whether this is the case.)
The April, 2022, complaint to CORE relied partly on evidence from a 2020 study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), identifying factories in China that used Uyghur forced labour. That report linked those factories to the supply chains of dozens of global brands.
When the complaint was initially filed last year, executives at two of the companies it named – Guess? Inc. and Levi Strauss & Co. – told The Globe that those factories were not in fact part of their supply chains as the ASPI report claimed.
On Wednesday, a Nike statement provided by spokesperson Sandra Carreon-John also said the ASPI report inaccurately linked the company to factories in Xinjiang, saying, “we have confirmed with our contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region.”