The Liberals appointed Sheri Meyerhoffer as the first Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise in April 2019, and advocates and MPs have since criticized the government for not launching a single investigation
The Liberals promised to create the ombudsperson role in the 2015 campaign, replacing a post Stephen Harper’s Conservative government created in 2009 that was restricted to advising the extractive sector and monitoring its corporate policies.
An external legal review commissioned by Ottawa sided with advocates, arguing Meyerhoffer cannot be effective without a temporary regulatory order and/or new legislation to be able to force disclosures from corporations. Of those, 13 were related to China’s Xinjiang region, where many Uyghur people reside, and the rest were related to Canadian firms operating in Bangladesh and the right to a living wage.
“Not all companies are going to engage. The only way we could move forward and do a true, thorough job would be to have those powers.”Article content The office has done its own reviews of issues abroad, such as an analysis of 10 Canadian garment companies operating outside the country. It found few tracked supply chains well enough to detect child labour, since many only monitor their systems in steps that follow the production of raw materials.
The UN says China needs to probe “allegations of torture, sexual violence, ill-treatment and forced medical treatment, as well as forced labour and reports of deaths in custody.”
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