Hannah's Comm 101 Blog

On October 31, 2011 CBC posted an article that brought a lot of attention to Canada’s worthless mining watchdog agency that is supposed to be keeping companies accountable for their overseas businesses dealings. The problem is the investigations conducted by the agency are all voluntary and any company can refuse to participate. In Terry Lee’s blog post

Logo of Excellon Resources Inc., a mining company that refused investigation into allegations of human rights violations in their Mexican mine

he discusses the reputation loss that the mining companies will experiece if they continue to refuse investigation of human rights allegations.

I agree with Terry in that refusing investigation looks extremely fishy and stakeholders will not want that stench of human rights violations around. Further more, with the huge wave of social responsibility happening, I think in the near future stakeholders will be pushing for the mining companies to be asking for investigation. There is so much transparency these days that companies will be pressured into cleaning up their act. Once their act is cleaned up, then they will want some way to confirm their legitimacy. I predict that Canada’s mining watchdog agency will soon be in high demand by mining companies to deem their business practices valid. This idea is very similar to my previous blog post on 1% for the people, but in that case it was companies wanting their environmental practices validated.