Dear Foreign Affairs Ministers,

I am writing to express my concern over the recently announced direction of CIDA with respect to its partnering with the international mining sector. I believe that these changes will only deepen poverty long-term while fostering a lack of accountability for an industry that is already rife with abuse.

Encouraging the NGO sector to team up with mining companies undermines the independence with which NGOs can advocate for people close to the mine. The Canadian mining sector has been involved with many well-documented human rights and environmental abuses around the world, including sexual violence, forced evictions, and the killing of protesters and community leaders. What we have seen over the past few years at CIDA is the defunding of groups such as Kairos and Development and Peace who have done work to advocate for the rights of communities negatively impacted by mining and the increase of funding of NGOs who are silent on these abuses. This dynamic is a violation of the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act, which mandates that CIDA takes into account the perspectives of the poor; and that funding is consistent with international human rights standards.

The new direction of CIDA also violates the Paris Principles, which is supposed to underpin foreign aid. The CIDA-funded Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development (CIIEID) is designed to “help developing nations harness their resources to generate sustainable economic growth," according to CIDA. However, by design this runs in clear contradiction to the first principle of the Paris Principles, which holds that "developing countries take a leadership role in coming up with their own national development strategies and donors respect that leadership."

At best, CIDA's partnerships with mining companies amount to a subsidy for a highly-profitable sector that is already supported by the Canadian Pension Plan, Export Development Canada, and numerous tax incentives. At worst, these partnerships further human rights abuses and violates the very principles that CIDA was created to uphold.

Please take action to reverse this troubling trend in International Development.

Sincerely,

[signatures]

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