Canada

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Ottawa Publish What You Pay-Canada welcomes an announcement by President Obama that the United States will implement the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI), and calls on the Canadian government to take the same step under their commitments to the Open Government Partnership (OGP).

Last Wednesday, Clare Short, a former cabinet minister in Tony Blair’s government, came to the University of Ottawa to present on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, its achievements, challenges, and the way it is moving forward. Short is the chairwoman of the EITI board. She was joined by Mark Pearson, director general of external affairs at Natural Resources Canada; François Meloche, an extra-financial risk manager with Bâtirente inc.; and Ian Smillie, chairman of the board of the Diamond Development Initiative International.

Download a pdf of PWYP Canada’s newsletter

Articles include:

• The Dodd-Frank Act: A Catalyst for Increasing Calls to Improve Transparency
• PAC Begins Work on a Regional Certification Mechanism for Conflict Minerals in the Great Lakes Region of Africa
• 5th EITI Global Conference Held in Paris: Six Countries Receive Compliant Status
• and Media Watch

Download the first issue of the newsletter from the ICGLR (International Conference on the Great Lakes Region) Regional Initiative on Natural Resources.

Download Aperio the newsletter by PWYP Canada

Laurent Coulibaly’s degree in geology has led him from the Burkina Faso city of Bobo-Dioulasso to a small office in west-end Ottawa where he works on developing gold mines in his homeland.

The 43-year-old father of three has worked for the past six years for Ottawa-based Orezone Gold Corp., part of an army of Canadian companies in the forefront of Africa’s push to develop its vast mineral resources.

Back home in Burkina Faso, siblings, cousins and friends are now working in the mining sector; he can count at least 20 cousins in the industry, which has provided an economic boost for a

In July 2010, the United States passed the Dodd-Frank Act requiring all US-listed companies to publish what they pay to governments for natural resource exploration and extraction, country-by-country and even project-by-project. In addition, the law also requires companies for which Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or adjoining country-based conflict minerals are necessary inputs to their products to publicly disclose measures taken to determine the source of such minerals and disclose a description of the manufactured products that use conflict minerals from the region.

In an effort to build on the momentum created by the Dodd-Frank Act, and universalize emerging best practice in the extractive industries, Publish What You Pay-Canada (PWYP-Canada) and the Revenue Watch Institute, in partnership with the International Human Rights Program (IHRP) at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, hosted a roundtable discussion entitled Harmonizing Canada-US Disclosure Requirements in the Extractive Industries.

By RWI Economic Analyst Andrew Bauer

In response to the historic transparency measures passed in the U.S. Dodd-Frank financial reforms, Canadian members of government, industry, civil society and academia gathered on January 18 to explore the new rules for companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges and their implications for rule-making in Canada. Organized by Revenue Watch, Publish What You Pay Canada and the human rights program at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, the roundtable was the first step in what is expected to be an ongoing discussion among Canadian stakeholders about transparency for extractive companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges.

PWYP-Canada would like to announce the launch of its second position paper, Staying Ahead of the Curve: Meeting Canada's Commitment to Transparency and Good Corporate Citizenship in the Extractive Industries. This latest publication features a comparison of the disclosure requirements in Canada and the US, following the US adoption of the Dodd-Frank Act. The paper focuses on two specific requirements set out in the Act, disclosure of payments to host governments and reporting on measures taken to assure conflict minerals do not enter a company's supply chain.