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46 BCBUSINESS DECEMBER/JANUARY 2019 the perpetrators haven't been identi•ed. Earlier in 2018, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala suspended Tahoe's mining licence, asking for a third-party review of both Escobal's environmental impact study, along with the Guatemalan Min- istry of Ener˜y and Mines' consultation process that resulted in its permitting in 2013. The mine, which has been shut since mid-2017, remains the target of blockades, as well as protests 40 kilometres away in the nation's capital, Guatemala City. Lawyer Fiorante, whose connection to Guatemala dates back to travels there in the early 1990s, when the country was still crippled by civil war, says he's "open to discussions about the bene•ts of min- ing." (He now serves as volunteer legal counsel for Project Somos, a Vancouver charity that helps orphaned Guatemalan children.) "But in countries like Eritrea and Guatemala where there is so much corruption, I don't think you can have any assurance that these bene•ts will trickle down to local people." CORE values Compared to such places, Canada has stringent mine assessment and permit- ting procedures—so stringent that Oxygen Capital's O'Dea says it's become di¤cult to develop projects on his home turf in a reasonable time frame. When a Canadian company makes a foreign play, especially in jurisdictions where democratic institu- tions are brittle, it takes a next-level com- mitment to corporate responsibility and oversight to ensure that the project meets the same standards expected in Canada. Factor in local contractors that may be accustomed to playing by a dierent set of ethical and legal rules, and events can quickly spiral out of control. That's a big reason why last Janu- ary, the federal government announced $6.8 million in funding over six years for the creation of CORE, the Canadian Ombuds person for Responsible Enter- prise, tasked with investigating allega- tions of human rights abuses involving Canadian companies of all stripes oper- ating outside the country. Ottawa is also establishing a multi-stakeholder advisory body to guide government and CORE on "responsible business conduct abroad." Even at the highest level of mining industry advocacy, it's widely accepted that Canada needs to step up its corporate responsibility game on foreign soil. Ben Chalmers, VP of sustainable development for the Ottawa-based Mining Association of Canada (MAC), says his organization sees the new willingness of Canadian courts to try cases involving foreign plaintis and Canadian companies as a step forward when it comes to transparency and clarity. In 2004, MAC began implementing its Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) initiative. Chalmers calls it a response to some high-pro•le tailings pond failures during the 1990s, such as the one near Virginia, South Africa, in 1994, when the Merriespruit tailings dam collapsed, kill- ing 17 people and destroying 80 houses. TSM provides protocols and frameworks for companies on all aspects of operations, including Aboriginal and community engagement, greenhouse gas emissions and tailings management, biodiversity conservation, health and safety, crisis management, mine closures, and the pre- vention of child and forced labour. To achieve TSM veri•cation, a company must conduct annual self-assessments, get an external veri•cation every three years and provide a CEO letter of assurance con- •rming that the outside assessment meets TSM standards, Chalmers says. "We're not without problems as an industry. But I'd say as a country, we're doing more than most to address con§icts that arise between companies and the communities in which they operate over- seas," he asserts. "I also think that we're seeing more companies adopting progres- sive and proactive policies on their own." As proof of Canada's commitment to socially responsible mining, Chalmers cites a 2018 study by Paul Haslam, an asso- ciate professor in the University of Otta- wa's faculty of social sciences, that rates 634 mining properties in •ve Latin Amer- ican countries for their impact on local communities. Out of this total, Haslam and his fellow researchers identi•ed 128 mines with known social con§ict, nearly 33 percent of them Canadian-owned. (For more, see p.43.) Different standards Although Chalmers think it's a decent batting average, Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, says if this is how Canadian

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