A human rights coalition is asking a federal body to investigate 14 Canadian companies accused of selling products made with forced labour in China.
Twenty-eight advocacy groups filed a complaint on Sunday with the Canadian Ombudsman for Responsible Enterprise, which is tasked with looking into allegations of human-rights abuses by Canadian corporations operating abroad.
Its mandate includes investigating businesses in the mining, petroleum and garment industry. The companies named in the complaint were Costco Canada, Gap Canada Inc., Hugo Boss Canada Inc., Nike Canada, Ralph Lauren Canada LP, Zara Canada Inc., Diesel Canada Inc., Guess? Canada Corporation, Levi Strauss & Co Canada Inc., Walmart Canada Corp., Lululemon Canada, Amazon Canada, Dynasty Gold Corp. and GobiMin Inc.
The 28 groups involved in the complaint include the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, the Toronto Association for Democracy in China and the Canadian Council of Imams, among others.
A 2020 study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute was cited by the group as evidence that 27 factories used by various corporations were using forced labour. Several companies including Guess and Levi Strauss have denied allegations that they were using the factories in their supply chains.
“We’ve made it clear to all our suppliers globally that we cannot accept any materials, including cotton, produced using forced labour or managed by entities implicated in forced labour, and we continue to review on an ongoing basis all supplier relationships to determine if any supplier or their sub-suppliers or subsidiaries have any links to forced labour or human trafficking,” said Levi Strauss & Co. chief sustainability officer Jeffrey Hogue.
In 2018, Ottawa pledged to bar imports of goods made with forced labour as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Over the weekend, the Federal Court rejected a separate bid for a general ban on the import of all goods from the Xinjiang region of China, where millions of Uyghurs are said to be incarcerated in forced labour camps.
The case by the Canadians in Support of Refugees in Dire Need called on the court to overturn a decision by the Canada Border Services Agency that claimed they had no authority to enforce such a ban.
The ban would have prohibited all goods that were mined, manufactured or produced using forced labour.
