Canada must enforce its rules

When it comes to barring products made by forced labour in China’s Xinjiang region, the Trudeau government says all the right things.

Where it falls down is in actually making sure that its own policies are enforced in practice.

At this point there’s not much doubt that China’s repression of the Uyghur people in remote Xinjiang includes the use of forced labour, among many other abuses that are part of Beijing’s crackdown on that Muslim minority.

A string of reports from human rights groups, the BBC, and advocates for the Uyghurs themselves agree that China uses forced labour, involving possibly hundreds of thousands of workers, as part of what it calls its “labour transfer program” in the region. The Canadian government itself supports that assessment.

And, on paper at least, Canada’s policy is clear, indeed admirable: goods produced “in whole or in part” by forced labour must not be imported into this country.

A general rule to that effect came into force last July, part of changes to the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, renegotiated at the insistence of the Trump administration. And Ottawa, along with Britain, followed that up in January with a series of measures specifically targeted at imports from Xinjiang.

If all that was being followed by companies importing goods from China, and enforced by Ottawa, there wouldn’t be a problem. But there’s mounting evidence it isn’t being enforced, at least not effectively.

Earlier this year, the Star and the Guelph Mercury Tribune published a joint investigation that found nearly 400 shipments had gone to Canadian companies since 2018 from Chinese manufacturers identified by the U.S. government as employers of forced Uyghur labour.

In early March, the Star and Mercury Tribune found that the tough-sounding new rules against forced labour hadn’t resulted in a single shipment from China being stopped from entry. And this week we learned that towels, sheets, clothing and other products advertised as containing “Xinjiang cotton” — the region produces fully a fifth of the world’s supply — can easily be bought online in Canada even though they are almost certainly the fruit of forced labour.

The government’s explanation for the apparent flouting of its own laws and policies? Officials in charge say they are still researching and monitoring “problematic” supply chains involving products imported from China to verify whether they really can be traced back to Beijing’s repressive practices.

That’s an awfully weak response in the face of China’s documented violations of basic human rights, and its open contempt for the Trudeau government.

That’s long been evident in its arbitrary imprisonment of the two Canadians held in reprisal for the extradition proceedings against a Chinese telecom executive in Vancouver. And it only got worse this week with a Chinese diplomat’s insulting dismissal of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a mere “boy” acting as a “running dog” of Washington.

In the face of all that, there’s no reason for Canada to tread softly in enforcing its rules against importing Chinese goods produced with forced labour.

The current system puts the onus on companies to check their supply chains and satisfy themselves that products like clothing and shoes don’t contain tainted cotton from Xinjiang.

Some big, high-profile companies — including Burberry, H&M and Adidas — have already declared they won’t use Xinjiang cotton, much to the fury of Beijing. But it’s too much to expect small importers to check back all the way through their supply chains to find out the exact source of the materials in every product. They don’t have the time or expertise.

The greatest burden should be on the government — not individual businesses or, even less, consumers — to make sure Canada upholds its laws and policies on forced labour.

That would mean, as Conservative MP Michael Chong has suggested, reversing the onus of responsibility. Instead of allowing imports of cotton and tomatoes (Xinjiang’s other big export product) from China unless they’re shown to involve forced labour, they should be banned unless they are proven to be untainted by Beijing’s oppression.

It would be a tough approach, but experience shows that nothing short of that will be effective.

Some big, high-profile companies have already declared they won’t use Xinjiang cotton