Natural Resources committee  The EU and the SEC in the U.S. looked at this issue carefully. The EU included very clear language—and I'll just read it out because it's here— to “not provide for any exemptions in cases of alleged disclosure prohibitions in foreign law or on confidentiality or commercial sensitivity grounds”.

Natural Resources committee  No, of course. I'm bringing those up as examples. In the Canadian context, the danger of including a process for granting exemptions is that you create an incentive for foreign jurisdictions to pass secrecy laws. In the literature, this is called the “tyrant's veto”. What we want to do is make sure that transparency transcends any of those laws and is enforced even in the toughest places.

Natural Resources committee  Forgive me, I didn't read the entire EU language, because I didn't want to take up too much of your time. But the transparency directive does evoke a principle of universality with regard to reporting payments, which states that: no exemptions, for instance for issuers active in certain countries, should be made which have a distortive impact and allow issuers to exploit lax transparency requirements.

Natural Resources committee  I would support what's just been said, both from the Mining Association and Publish What You Pay Canada. The issue I wanted to raise, using this opportunity, was on something that CAPP mentioned earlier. First, we're obviously quite pleased to hear that CAPP would like to align with the U.K.

Natural Resources committee  Yes. We're recommending alignment with the U.S. and EU.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to speak today, Chairman and all the members of the committee. By way of introduction, as Mr. Benoit said, I'm an economic analyst with the Natural Resource Governance Institute. I've been working with Publish What You Pay Canada, the Mining Association of Canada, and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada for the last few years on exactly this issue, payments transparency.