Harpies of Political Correctitude descend on Canadian mining cowboys at KWG Resources

I've always been somewhat ambivalent about Canada's mining industry. For book-keeping and sundry further reasons a lot of international mining companies that aren't really all that Canadian like to make this country their home base.

If you track the track record of these "Canadian" miners, you will be mightily underwhelmed. Mining Watch is a good base from which to track them.

What you'll find is a sordid record of human rights violations; disappearing anti-development activists, indigenous peasants pushed off their land, disappeared journalists who's torsos reappear in different locales than their heads... it goes on and on. Track the human rights record around Canadian mining companies and you will be appalled.

Rarely do these outrages appear in the mainstream media.

But, by God, one outrage has gone a bridge too far.

Nevermind dead mine opponents and disappeared journos. That's the stuff that would never surface in Canadian media.

But a junior mining outfit with a small stake in a potential northern Ontario mining project has hit the headlines with a tongue-in-cheek advert featuring a couple of young women scantily clad...

Oh My God!

That's friggin' sexism!

They're objectifying women! That has utterly and absolutely no place in an industry that routinely makes their opponents in the Global South disappear!

The outrage is near universal... the Canadian Mining Journal, the Mining Association of Canada, the Prospectors and Developers Association... even the blue-bloods at Earnscliffe Strategy Group have united to decry as one the utterly sexist use of bikini-clad women to promote a mining project!

But if it's random dumbfuck environmentalist mine opponents losing their lives in Mali or Peru those same mainstream voices will rarely have a word to say.

Canada leads world in CSR

What the hell is CSR, you ask?

Why, that would be "corporate social responsibility,"

Yup, we're leaders all right. In fact, we pretty much invented the concept, just like we invented R2P and saving women and girls etc.

CSR has been splashed around the Dept. of Foreign Affairs website a fair bit.

I'm suspicious.

I'm suspicious for multiple reasons. First of all, I'm suspicious because Baird's bailiwick is famous for just making shit up. Oh ya, there's been another Russian invasion of Ukraine this week, and so on.

Secondly, I'm suspicious because sometimes Canada's "leadership" isn't what it seems. Take the much ballyhooed leadership in saving women and girls for example. You can find dozens upon dozens of press releases on the DFA website wherein Baird and Co. pat themselves on the back for... saving women and girls worldwide.

Dig into the back-stories a bit, and you'll find they're talking about some "aid" program co-sponsored by some franken-food conglomerate that is providing franken-seeds and the accoutrements of "modern agriculture" to some less developed nation. It's not as if they're lying; franken-foods are indeed edible, and women and girls have to eat, but the way we frame our "aid" tends to be somewhat misleading at times...

OK! Pretty much all the time!

Thirdly, I can't help but think of Gwyn Morgan when I think of CSR. Gwyn talked a lot about CSR while he was Chair of the Board of Directors at SNC Lavalin. Even as he was talking about corporate social responsibility, his company was being exposed as a serial practitioner of bribes and kick-backs world-wide.

Fourthly, when you take a serious look at it, Canada's world-leading extractive industry is a world leader in defiling local environments, abusing local populations, and leaving a mess for future generations to clean up. Mining Watch is a good source of information on how Canada leads the world in ethical extractive practices.

Finally, I'm suspicious because of the very nomenclature of this latest good cause.

CSR. Corporate social responsibility. Think about it; that's ultimately an oxy-moron, isn't it?