Foreign policy is mining policy – by Elizabeth Payne (Ottawa Citizen – March 8, 2012)

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Elizabeth Payne is a member of the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial board.

Six months after International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda announced CIDA would fund three controversial development partnerships between NGOs and Canadian mining companies, the federal government is laying the groundwork for more foreign aid to be delivered with the help of the mining industry. It’s a trend in international development that is raising new concerns.
 
“As I listen to this conversation … I sometimes think I’m at a business development meeting,” NDP MP Jinny Jogindera Sims said during recent Foreign Affairs and International Development committee hearings into the role of the private sector in achieving Canada’s international development interests.
 
“The purpose of … international development … aid is to reduce poverty. Yet a lot of the focus I’ve heard today has been on putting infrastructures in place or institutions in place that will help the mining companies.” Sims said she has concerns “about our aid being so closely tied to one particular industry.” 
When the pilot projects partnering NGOs with Canadian mining companies to deliver aid became public last year, critics raised concerns about the embrace of mining as a foreign policy tool and the use of aid dollars to support corporate social responsibility projects.
 
The new direction in foreign policy is having other negative effects, the same House of Commons committee was warned last week.
 
Anthony Bebbington, director of the Graduate School of Geography at Massachusetts-based Clark University, told the committee that he has heard from Latin American politicians that Canada’s foreign policy links with mining are undermining the country’s credibility. “I don’t know if Canada has been quite so discredited in its history,” a Latin American minister of the environment (whom he did not name) said to Bebbington. He also quoted a “sub-secretary in a ministry of energy and mines” as saying this: “As far as I can tell, the Canadian ambassador here is a representative for Canadian mining companies.”
 
The comments, he noted, did not come from “raving left-of-centre activists. They are from politically appointed technocrats trying to build public policy and address poverty and vulnerability in very practical ways.”
 
In a week when Joe Oliver, minister of natural resources, lavishly praised the contribution of mining to the Canadian economy during the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s international convention, the links between Canada’s mining industry and foreign policy appear tighter than ever.
 
For the rest of this article, please go to the Ottawa Citizen website: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Foreign+policy+mining+policy/6267948/story.html