Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced last week that the government eliminated an office created to probe overseas human rights complaints about Canadian corporations, including mining conglomerates. This comes only months after the foreign affairs minister said the office was “important.” The announcement shocked environmental and human rights nonprofit organizations and those who said they have faced personal risk to alert Canadian authorities about actions by corporations based in the country. The Canadian government created the office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) in 2019 to evaluate complaints about alleged human rights abuses by Canadian companies operating abroad in the garment, mining, and oil and gas sectors. At a June 11 press conference, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government had eliminated the CORE office months before because it considered the agency ineffective, only conducting one investigation in seven years. But his government made no public announcement about the decision, and three weeks earlier had addressed questions from Mongabay about the status of its investigations. While the office failed to complete any investigations for its first four years of operations, it reported on the outcome of five complaints in 2024, its last year with a permanent Ombudsperson. Since then, the office has been without a permanent leader. In April 2024, an interim Ombudsperson took over the post until May 20, 2025; the role has since sat vacant. “The Carney government’s reasons for disbanding the ombudsman are at best misinformed but much more likely a deliberate favor to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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