In any event, it is understood that certain interests will be protected. Disclosure of information on the conditions in which corporations earn profits is a question that should be of concern to any democratically minded person. However, the only considerations that must be disclosed are those based on the interests of corporations or their shareholders. A careful reading of existing regulations shows that nobody is paying serious attention to circumstances such as human-rights violations or environmental, political, social, and fiscal abuses, of which many companies listed on Canadian stock exchanges stand accused around the world. According to continuous disclosure guidelines, which define the obligation to disclose information on securities in Canada,38 managers must keep markets closely informed of the “uncertainties” of their activities with regard to market “performance” criteria; but in the area of “risks” an organization can tolerate with regard to the ecosystem, or the life or political organization of populations, these factors must be reported only if the data is likely to have a “market impact,” or to influence a “reasonable investor” in his or her decision to purchase a stock.
Since the prevailing economic anthropology assumes that our model investor is interested only in gain, a large amount of information on the damage inflicted by extraction projects is suppressed, because it is considered irrelevant to the extreme self-interest of the imagined investor. In fact, in Toronto, the definition of financial information that must be disclosed is strictly based on the narrow concept of “material information,” which “is that which either results or could be expected to result in a change in the market price or value of the company’s stock.”39 The sole determining factors are the criteria adopted by the stereotyped “reasonable” (read: grasping) investor and “market impact.” Those who read between the lines will also understand that the “environmental liabilities” that corporations are required to disclose40 appear in the eyes of “reasonable” investors more as a handicap than as an objective piece of information. New environmental reporting guidelines,41 introduced in October 2010, continue to provide not a single restrictive measure in social or environmental terms.42 Only “risks” on environmental matters must be disclosed with respect to the determining factor, which is the materiality factor that might have an impact on the issuer’s “performance,” meaning its financial performance related to environmental issues mainly with respect to financial issues.43 As for the euphemistic jargon that the business world defines as “corporate social responsibility,” Canada actually “obliges” companies to boast of their feats in this area. “If your company has implemented social or environmental policies that are fundamental to your operations … describe them and the steps your company has taken to implement them.”44 The same holds true for the Global Reporting Initiative, a set of voluntary guidelines for reporting on economic, environmental, and social performance. Canada is thus unable to do more than urge or invite mining companies to maximize the marketing impact of their alleged “social” or “green” investments. Mining companies respond to the invitation in the storytelling mode, relating their social concerns in cloying business-speak, singing the praises of voluntary commitments and programs that may or may not have any real impact in countries where, in any case, the companies are paying almost no taxes.45 “These texts consist of several smaller narratives: here, children are given scholarships; there, a Tanzanian student is supported at a leading Canadian university; somewhere else, we build a primary school. No figures are produced but there are repeated references to individual beneficiaries of the company’s generosity, demonstrating how corporate charity has changed their lives. We also find vaguely worded declarations of principle distantly related to the company’s actual practices,” writes Gaétan Breton, professor of accounting at the Université du Québec à Montréal, in an article on the community commitments of Barrick Gold.46
According to the European Parliament, voluntary measures in the Canadian manner, with their “restrictions” of convenience, are altogether insufficient. In November 2007, it rejected a recommendation by the Brussels-based European Commission to the effect “that voluntary reporting guidelines would be sufficient” in the mining and energy industries – a system that would have mirrored Canadian practices.47
Although some members of “civil society” may find it sufficient to insist that investors show some sensitivity to environmental and social issues,48 this is not enough. What we need to understand is that public or civic figures in Canada are helping to maintain a powerful taboo on one of the key issues of our jurisdiction: that of “externalities,” defined as the consequences of company activities that are not listed on their balance sheet. In some cases, the environmental, social, political, or cultural damage they cause not only has little if any harmful effect on the company, but actually constitutes the way in which the company is able to profit from its reprehensible activities while destroying the environment and bringing disaster to the populations involved. As long as no independent audits are required to assess this kind of damage, there will be no reason to speak of corporate “responsibility” for these companies in Canada.
Reaching New Heights of Permissiveness
Meanwhile in Canada, Canadian financial and political institutions are highly speculative and permissive. Companies whose overriding concern is to promote their share price, without regard for scientific objectivity where their property is concerned, take full advantage of the huge methodological blind spots provided by Canadian legislation, profiting from regulations whose broad areas of ambiguity are exactly designed to favour the speculation they claim to restrict. Corporate marketing does the rest: fancy websites, prospectuses printed on glossy paper, aggressive selling by brokers, and cleverly disguised infomercials in the business press. There are also ways of artificially boosting shares; for example, virtual entities based in tax havens are used to buy and rebuy stocks so that it looks as if the market is interested.49
This explains why speculators themselves, despite all the fulsome remarks they hear about the nobility of self-regulated markets and players, still view the financial market centred on mineral resources as risky, especially where exploration companies are concerned.
Canada is not obliged to follow this policy of permissiveness. In Washington, a series of legislative actions have recently been taken that will force American companies to restrict their commercial involvement in the mining field, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congo Conflict Minerals Act,50 enacted in 2009, prohibits U.S. companies from dealing in minerals from the Congo such as coltan and gold when such economic activity would encourage “illegal armed groups and human rights violations in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.”51 Incorporated into the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,52 which