Comment: Transparency act may hurt indigenous communities – Canadian Mining Journal
This February the Canadian government tabled a new measure known as the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act. It will force oil & gas and mining companies to disclose payments that they make to foreign and domestic government entities.
The act has merit. Disclosure will probably make it harder for corrupt governments to keep the benefits of mineral development for themselves rather than using them for the public good.
But there could be a major downside, says the Mining Association of Canada. MAC and a group of non-governmental organizations proposed the transparency act, but they never intended it should apply domestically, that is to Canada’s aboriginal peoples.
There is nothing in the law as it is currently written that would stop the Canadian government from decreasing its contribution to First Nations by an amount equal to what they receive from industry.
