Africa: Canada in Africa - 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation

By Yves Engler

Despite rhetoric about aid to the poorest people in the world, the Harper Conservatives have worked assiduously to ensure that Canadian corporations profit from Africa's vast mineral resources.
Even widespread criticism of their operations has failed to dampen the Conservatives' support for Canada's many mining interests in Africa. Canadian mining companies have been accused of bribing officials, evading taxes, dispossessing farmers, displacing communities, employing forced labour, devastating ecosystems and spurring human rights violations.


But, more important than the specific instances of abuse, which I detail in my forthcoming 'Canada in Africa -- 300 years of Aid and Exploitation', the mining industry contributes little to sustainable economic development. Instead it is a prime part of a vast vacuuming up of resources to benefit wealthy people, only a very few of whom live in Africa.
Indifferent to the deleterious impacts of the sector, International Trade Minister Ed Fast has included numerous mining executives in his delegations to the continent while former Foreign Minister John Baird visited African countries partly based on where Canadian resource companies sought business. For his part, International Development Minister Christian Paradis praised the sector's development benefits in a bid to (misleadingly) convince African officials that "Canada owes much of its economic growth to extractive industries."
Stephen Harper personally promoted Canadian mining companies. When leaders from Tanzania, South Africa and Benin visited Ottawa in 2013 he used the opportunity to promote mining interests. During a trip to Senegal in 2012 the PM met with representatives from five resource firms or trade associations and publicly lauded the sector. On a visit to Tanzania in 2007 Harper gave audience to more than 10 Canadian resource firms, describing the meeting as an opportunity to discuss "the general business climate [and] what the government of Canada can do to assist in building our investments here." In the months after Harper's visit, reported This Day, the Canadian High Commission launched an "intense" lobbying effort to convince Tanzania's Parliament to reject the country's Mineral Sector Review Committee's recommendation that a larger proportion of profits from higher mineral prices be retained by the government.
Since 2012 Ottawa has pumped tens of millions of dollars into mining initiatives in Africa. The public money helped establish branch offices of a professional society, the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum, in Senegal and Burkina Faso and a Senegalese school for geomatics (combining geography and information technology to map natural resources).
Last year, Canada gave $18.5 million of tax money for an extractives skills training centre in Mozambique and earlier this year Ottawa announced a $12.5 million grant for the Project Strengthening Education for Mining in Ethiopia "to develop more industry driven geology and mining engineering undergraduate programs."