"Creating Canada's modern slavery bill," 21 February 2019

In October of 2018, the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs released a report entitled A Call to Action: Ending the Use of All Forms of Child Labour in Supply Chains... Most importantly... the Committee also called upon the Government of Canada to introduce legislation to compel businesses to eliminate the use of forced and child labour from their supply chains... On 13 December 2018, I introduced Bill C-423, or the Modern Slavery Bill, in Parliament. The purpose is to implement Canada’s international commitment to confirm supply chain transparency and contribute to the fight against modern slavery. The Act requires companies that have assets over CAD 20 million and revenue over CAD 40 million to ensure that their supply chains are transparent and free of goods produced by slavery if they wish to do business in Canada... In drafting the Bill, reference was made to both the British and Australian initiatives. The UK has the most experience, but the inability to impose sanctions for failure to comply led us to conclude that there needed to be a penalty of some sort... Addressing modern slavery is not just a Canadian issue; it is a matter of international human rights. Jurisdictions across the globe need to join with one another to eradicate this scourge.