In January 2018 Canada announced an ombudsperson who would independently investigate what its mining, oil and gas and garment companies did abroad, the first of its kind in the world. In April 2019 it created the post by Order in Council as an adviser to a minister, and withheld the one power an investigator needs: to make a company hand over a document. In June 2026 the Prime Minister said the office had been eliminated months earlier, because in seven years it had completed one investigation. On this ship a diver who comes up with one specimen is asked a question first: was there air in the line? The crew went below and read the orders.
“Canadian mining companies are a dirty secret.”
“June 2026, Carney’s eliminated the Office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise. It investigated allegations of human rights and labor violations committed by Canadian garment, mining, and oil and gas companies operating abroad.”
This one is unusual for the series, and it is worth saying so at the top. The central sentence is true. The Office of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise, which everyone involved called the CORE, is gone. Its complaints line is closed, its files have been offered to another office, and its web address now answers with that other office’s page. The Prime Minister said the word eliminated himself, in Toronto, on 11 June 2026.
So the work here is not to kill the claim. It is to find out what the claim is standing on, because two of its four parts are weaker than they look, one is half right, and one is stronger than the people repeating it seem to know. June 2026 is the month the public was told, not the month anything was decided. It investigated credits the office with a power it was refused in writing before it opened. Dirty secret, read the way the phrase is actually used, is the strong one: not a thing hidden, but a thing in plain view that nobody with the power to act on it says aloud. And Carney’s names the hand that closed the office without naming the hand that disabled it.
The crew’s way of putting it: a diver was announced in 2018, sent down in 2019 without an air line, and recalled in 2026 for coming up with one specimen. The orders that sent the diver down are public. They are read below, in the order they were signed.
Twenty entries, each fixed by a document. The hinge rows are the ones where a power was promised, withheld, or asked for again.
core-ombuds.canada.ca answers every request with a permanent redirect to the National Contact Point’s page at Global Affairs. The page was last modified on 10 August. It does not mention the office it replaced.The claim has four moving parts: a date, a verb, a secret and a name. Each is tested against the log above. Three die, in whole or in part. The secret is the one that holds.
The surviving finding is about authorship, not about the closing. The office was described as an investigator, built as an adviser, judged as an investigator, and closed. The sections below take the three parts of that in turn: the power that was withheld, what each complaint reached without it, and the week it was recalled.
An ombudsperson who cannot compel is a diver on a surface-supplied line with nothing at the other end. Everything she brings up depends on what the company chooses to hand over. That is not a metaphor the crew invented. It is the legal review’s sentence, written in May 2019 for the minister who had just created the post: “If the CORE is structured as an ombudsperson appointed as a Ministerial Advisor, as is currently the case, its effectiveness will be dependent on the cooperation of the complainant and the entity being investigated.”
The structure was chosen on purpose. The two April 2019 orders made the ombudsperson a special adviser to the Minister under the Public Service Employment Act, an appointment category built for advisers, not for tribunals. The September 2019 mandate, P.C. 2019-1323, lists what she may do: review complaints, decide her own fact-finding procedure, offer informal mediation, recommend that a company be cut off from trade advocacy and Export Development Canada, publish, follow up. It is silent on what a company must do, because an Order in Council of that kind cannot say.
The review offered two ways out, and the government read both. Legislation was “the best way.” Failing that, appointing the ombudsperson a commissioner under Part I of the Inquiries Act “could also achieve that objective, while, at the same time, retaining the overall mandate currently envisaged.” Minister Carr wrote in September 2019 that he had chosen the first and asked officials to begin. By November 2020 the network that had stood beside him at the announcement was told the work had stopped. The briefing for his successor’s committee appearance in March 2021 explains why in two lines: the adviser “cannot be vested with coercive powers,” and the inquiry route carries legal risk, including that “complaints between third parties may not appropriately fall within the scope of a public inquiry.”
So the position in 2021, when the hatch opened, was this. The office’s own department had concluded, in writing, that the office as built could not be made to work as announced, and had decided not to rebuild it. Parliament’s human rights subcommittee asked again in June 2023. The ombudsperson herself asked again in March 2024, in the one final report she was able to complete, naming her “limited powers to compel testimony and documentary evidence” as the reason the subject of that report could ignore her meetings. The line was never connected. Five years later the diver was recalled for the catch.
The office published its procedure as six stages, from a complaint being filed to a recommendation being acted on. For twelve of the complaints it received, the stage reached is on the public record, together with the ombudsperson’s own description of how far the company cooperated. The instrument puts the two side by side. Drag through the twelve and watch the two columns move together: the depth a file reached is, almost without exception, the depth the company let it reach.
Engagement labels are the ombudsperson’s own, from the reports. Twelve more active files at the closing were never described in public and cannot be placed.
Three things the gauge shows that the word ineffective does not. The two companies that engaged once an investigation was announced, Ralph Lauren and Hugo Boss, went to mediation and the complaints were withdrawn, one of them under a non-disclosure agreement signed in November 2023; the public will not learn what was agreed. The six that gave limited or very limited engagement sat at stage four from 2023 until the office closed, because stage five needs documents. And the one file that reached a final report got there without the company at all: the finding against Dynasty Gold rests on the public record of the region and on its joint-venture partners’ own admissions, not on anything the company produced.
The office’s last published count, to 31 March 2024, was thirty-five complaints received and seventeen found admissible. It announced nine investigations in 2023. The written answer tabled in the Commons on 10 June 2026 counts five. Both figures are the government’s, and the gap between them is not explained in the record.
The Prime Minister’s figure was one. It is correct. Here is the one.
Dynasty Gold is a Vancouver company with a majority interest in the Hatu Qi-2 gold project in Xinjiang, through a joint venture with two regional partners. The complaint was one of the thirteen filed on 21 June 2022. The investigation was announced on 11 July 2023 and the final report published on 26 March 2024. It found, on the balance of probabilities, that a human rights abuse occurred at the project; that Dynasty “has contributed to the use of forced labour at the Hatu mine” by “having done nothing to identify, assess, and address or mitigate the risk”; and that the company had delayed its replies, failed to provide the documents requested, failed to attend meetings, and declined to comment on the draft. The company’s public reply was that the report was “full of errors and inaccuracies.”
The recommendations were the only teeth the 2019 mandate had given her, and she used all of them: that Dynasty make a significant donation to organisations working against Uyghur forced labour and assess its leverage at the mine; that Global Affairs Canada withdraw current and deny future trade advocacy support; and that Export Development Canada refuse future financial support until the company complied. Two of those three are addressed to the government that created the office.
That is the whole of the catch. One specimen, brought up through a closed line, handed to the deck, and set down. Two years later the same deck said the diver had been ineffective because there was only one. The sentence is true. It leaves out who tied the line off.
The closing was announced in the one place nobody would look for it, so the sequence matters. On 23 March 2026 the United Nations Human Rights Committee asked Canada to appoint a new ombudsperson urgently, and the office said no decision had been announced. On 25 March the foreign minister said it remained important. On 6 June the office counted twenty-four live files for a reporter. On 10 June the government’s written answer to Parliament said in due course. On the morning of the 11th the trade minister said it again in the House. That afternoon, in Toronto, at a news conference about food, in reply to a question about American tariffs, the Prime Minister said the office had been eliminated months before.
Two details fix the character of the thing. First, the office kept taking complaints until the Prime Minister spoke. The department said so in July: “The CORE stopped accepting complaints following the announcement on the pending closure made by the prime minister.” Whatever was decided a few months ago was not communicated to the office that was being closed. Second, the department’s justification, a week later, included the sentence “given concerns about whether the initiative was fit to deliver results, the role of the ombudsperson has remained vacant.” The vacancy, in other words, was not neglect. It was the method.
The complainants were offered two options by email: move the file to the National Contact Point, or close it. One of them, who had brought a Namibian case in 2024, told the CBC: “Yet here we are with our case being shepherded to an office that we never would have consented to.”
The National Contact Point was established in 2000, under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, and sits inside the Trade Strategy Bureau of Global Affairs Canada. Its mandate is to promote the Guidelines and offer good offices: it brings a complainant and a company to the same table if both agree to sit. It does not investigate and it does not find. Its 2025 annual report describes its work as having “offered good offices and facilitated a dialogue between the parties.” It lists two cases under assessment and three concluded.
That record is why the 2018 announcement happened. The campaign for an ombudsperson ran for a decade on the argument that the contact point could not do the job, and the government agreed with it in public, in January 2018, by promising an office that could independently investigate. The 2019 mandate placed the new office alongside the old one, each with its own door. In 2026 the department described the old one as having the “stronger track record of effectiveness” and pointed the new office’s address at it.
There is a fair version of the department’s argument, and the crew states it. Two voluntary mechanisms are one too many; an office that cannot compel adds a letterhead, not a power; the money is better spent on the border, where Bill C-35 now puts the burden on importers to prove their goods are clean. All of that may be so. None of it is what was promised in 2018, and none of it reaches a Canadian company’s conduct at a mine abroad, which is the only thing the eliminated office existed to look at.
The claim says Canada closed the office that investigated its companies abroad. The log says Canada announced an investigator, created an adviser, was told in writing that the adviser could not investigate, declined to change that, waited for the result, and then cited the result. The elimination in 2026 is the last line of a decision taken in 2019. That is what a dirty secret actually is: not a hidden thing, but a thing in a dated government document that nobody with the power to act on it has read aloud. It is narrower than the post, and a great deal harder to argue with.
What the record does not support is the idea that it was one man’s, or that any of it was concealed in the ordinary sense; it was in the open, which is the point. The power was withheld under one Prime Minister and the office closed under the next; the department’s reasoning is the same in the 2021 briefing and the 2026 statement. Nor does the record support the loud version of the underlying charge. The one completed file is a case where a regional state’s labour programme was the forced labour and a Canadian company’s failure was to ask no questions. That is a finding about diligence, not about a deal. The office that could have found out more was never given the means to.
One thing the crew would want checked rather than believed: the instrument of elimination. If an Order in Council revoking P.C. 2019-0300 and 2019-1323 exists, it will appear in the register, and the date on it will settle what a few months ago means. None has been cited. Until one is, the office was not abolished. It was left empty on purpose, and the emptiness was then described as the office’s fault.
The diver was announced with a line, and sent down without one.
In seven years she brought up one specimen, through a hose nobody had connected, and the deck set it down unread.
Then the deck struck her berth from the roster, months before anyone was told, and called it the size of the catch.
Grouped by the section each one supports.
The closing, as reported
Each date, from the document that fixes it
core-ombuds.canada.ca/index.aspx?lang=eng on 17 October 2026 returned 301 Moved Permanently to the National Contact Point page, whose date-modified line reads 10 August 2026. Anyone can repeat the request.The twelve files
The eleven weeks
The contact point
Visual direction after the oceanographic films of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the crew of the R.V. Calypso, 1943–1996. The saucer is the SP-350 “Denise”. No affiliation; the debt is the point.