Ottawa blasted for lax regulation
Critics ask why Canada has yet to deny entry to shipments with suspected links to exploitation
Border agents still have not prevented a single shipment from entering Canada on suspicion it was linked to forced labour, new data shows, almost four years after the country adopted new rules under the renegotiated North American trade pact.
That’s a stark contrast to enforcement in the United States, where authorities report they have denied thousands of shipments of goods within the past two years over concerns they were made or sourced using forced labour.
It also comes as the Liberal government in Ottawa continues to promise it will table delayed legislation to “eradicate” forced labour from Canadian supply chains — a commitment first made during the 2021 federal election campaign — and as the first deadline approaches for businesses and federal institutions to report on their efforts to ensure the products they use aren’t tied to forced labour.
Noting the level of shipments Americans have seized over forced labour abroad, Sen. Julie MivilleDechêne — who co-sponsored legislation that created the new reporting requirements last year — said it’s unlikely that nothing is entering Canada that was produced or sourced through forced labour, which the International Labour Organization (ILO) defines as work done under coercion or intimidation. The organization estimated that 27.6 million people were working as forced labourers in 2022, including more than 1.5 million children who were in “commercial sexual exploitation.”
“It’s a disgrace,” Miville-Dechêne said of Canada’s current rules to block the import of goods made from forced labour.
“Obviously, we have enforcement problems,” she said.
In an email Monday evening, a spokesperson for the border agency described how it works with the federal employment and social services department to determine whether an imported product could be made with forced labour. “Establishing that goods have been produced by forced labour requires significant research and analysis and supporting information,” the statement said.
A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, whose department oversees the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. The fact that Canada isn’t stopping shipments for being linked to forced labour emerged last year, when it was revealed that the CBSA had only seized one shipment of goods under new provisions from the revamped trade deal, but then allowed the shipment to go through after an appeal months later.
New details about that shipment — and the fact that it remains the only one stopped since the new provisions came into effect in July 2020 — were included in a written statement from the federal Public Safety Department that was recently tabled in Parliament, in response to a question from Bloc Québécois MP Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay.
According to the department, the shipment of $68,623 worth of children’s cotton sleepers from China was intercepted in September 2021, then deemed to be at least partly produced by forced labour. The shipment was released the following February, after the unnamed importer successfully appealed the decision.
Savard-Tremblay had asked the Public Safety Department why no goods had been seized entering Canada when the United States reports “seizures of millions of dollars of goods.”
The Bloc MP tied his question to forced labour in China’s Xinjiang region, where the country’s authoritarian regime represses the area’s Uyghur Muslims, according to multiple media investigations and reports from human rights organizations. In 2021, Human Rights Watch reported that up to a million people had been detained in government facilities that include “political education camps,” torture and forced labour.
A majority of MPs in the House of Commons also voted to accuse China of committing genocide against Uyghur and Turkic Muslims in February 2021.
One month earlier, an investigation by the Star and the Guelph Mercury Tribune found hundreds of shipping containers had come into Canada full of goods made by Chinese manufacturers that appeared on a U.S. list of companies using forced labour.
Later that year, the U.S. passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. According to data published by the U.S. border agency, more than 8,000 shipments worth $4.33 billion were inspected under that law since mid-2022, more than half of which were “denied.”
When Savard-Tremblay asked the Public Safety Department to explain why Canada isn’t making more seizures, the government said U.S. border agents have more power. For instance, they can make orders that place the onus on importers to demonstrate their goods aren’t linked to forced labour before they’re allowed in the country.
By contrast, Canadian border agents don’t have the same authority, according to the response. They can only act on “case-by-case basis,” using available information based on a “balance of probabilities.”
Savard-Tremblay says the current regime is too weak and fails to respond to concerns about forced labour goods entering Canada. The law that created reporting requirements does nothing for enforcement, he said, while the Liberal government has already kicked back its promise to introduce a law to weed out forced labour from the country’s supply chains, which it vowed to introduce before the end of last year but is now pledging to table before 2025.
Asked why it’s taking so long to introduce a bill first promised more than two years ago, Hartley Witten, a spokesperson for Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan, only said the government still intends to introduce “strong legislation” before the end of 2024 that will add “teeth” to the reporting requirements created through last year’s law.
The Liberal government in Ottawa continues to promise it will table delayed legislation to ‘eradicate’ forced labour from Canadian supply chains — a commitment first made during the 2021 federal election campaign