Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan says he will introduce a bill in Parliament by year’s end that will block slave-made goods from entering the country.
“This year we will introduce legislation to help eradicate forced labour from Canadian supply chains. The legislation will be strong, effective and enforceable,” Mr. O'Regan said in a statement first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter. The minister did not specify what measures would be in the legislation.
Minister O'Regan made the announcement while marking the anniversary of the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which housed five garment factories. Over 1,100 workers were killed in the disaster and 2,500 others injured.
Parliament last year passed Bill S-211, An Act To Amend The Customs Tariff, which required some importers to report each year to the minister of public safety on what they had done to reduce and prevent the risk of forced labour or goods made with child labour from entering Canada.
While it achieved royal assent in May of 2023, the bill has yet to bear fruit. The Canadian Border Services Agency (CSBA) has yet to report any seizures of slave-labour goods entering Canada.
A CSBA report made public earlier this month revealed that only one shipment worth roughly $68,000 had been flagged as suspicious since July 2020. The shipment was allowed into the country after the shipper appealed the decision in February 2022.
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Bloc Quebecois MP Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, who requested the information from the CBSA, noted that in contrast to Canada, the United States has halted billions of dollars worth of forced-labour-made goods from entering their country.
The CBSA, in its report to Mr. Savard-Tremblay, said the U.S. border service has the authority to demand proof from importers that goods were not made with forced labour. Canada’s border agency does not have that same authority, however, and border officers must have evidence of forced labour before halting a shipment.
Claude Vaillancourt, president of the Quebec-based advocacy group Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action, criticized the Canadian government earlier this year for failing to stop the importation of slave-made goods.
He told the House of Commons Canada-China committee last month that Canada was lagging behind other countries like the United States, France, Germany and Norway, and called on Ottawa to create a similar model to stop slave-made goods from entering the country.
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