Mining & Canadian Companies

CANADA'S DIRTY TRACK RECORD IN TIBET

Canada is the foreign nation with the greatest number of investments in Tibet, particularly in the railway and mining sectors. The following ventures have only become commercially viable through the operation of the railway from Golmud to Lhasa, starting up 2006.

These Canadian ventures completely avoid the topic of adopting a clearly stated human rights policy, and few of them adhere to their own stated positions on ethical business practices when in China. Nortel, for instance, states the following position on its website: "We strive to do the right thing for individuals, organizations, and society in general." Fine words, but Tibetans have absolutely no say in what is happening to Tibet's resources. The land area of Tibet is by law owned by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), which enforces its decisions through its extensive military and paramilitary arms. A case in point is the forced re-settlement of Tibetan nomads to make way for mining and hydropower projects, done in full collusion with the foreign joint venture operations.

Corporations like Nortel and Bombardier should comply with the UN guidelines under its Global Compact, and the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. It would appear that none of the following listed companies would pass the grade for those UN guidelines, because they are operating well out of sight when in Tibet, without monitoring for standards. This is clearly a case of derailment of human rights issues when it comes to mining—which has significant potential for toxic dumping into Tibet's pristine rivers and lakes.

RAILWAY TO LHASA

• Bombardier Inc (Montreal)—building special railcars for Golmud-Lhasa line. The locomotives, which can handle high-altitude conditions, are built by General Electric USA
• Power Corp (Montreal)—building special railcars for Golmud-Lhasa line
• Nortel (Montreal)—digital wireless communications network for the Golmud-Lhasa line
• RailPartners (subsidiary of American company TGZ, but investors largely from Canada)—involved in high-end touring to Tibet, using luxury railcars built by Bombardier

BOTTLED SPRING WATER

• Tibet Glacier Mineral Water Co (Canadian-HK joint-venture)—tapping springwater near Lhasa, and shipping by railway to China's east coast mega-cities, like Shanghai and Beijing. The bottled water goes under the brandname '5100', which is the elevation of the spring source 170km north of Lhasa. Tibet has huge untapped groundwater reserves across the plateau.

MINING ON THE TIBETAN PLATEAU

• Continental Minerals / Hunter-Dickinson (Vancouver)—copper, gold, at site close to the Yarlung Tsangpo, the major river running across southern Tibet. The Continental mining site, called Xietongmen, apparently lies within a designated nature reserve
• Jinshan Gold Mines (Vancouver)—this Canadian company acquired a sizeable share of the Xietongmen property from Continental in 2009. Has a large mining site at Gyama in Medrokungar, central Tibet.
• Inter-Citic Minerals (Markham, Ontario)—gold-mining inside designated nature reserve
• Silk Road Resources (Toronto)—gold
• Eldorado Gold Corp (Vancouver)—gold
• Maxy Gold Corp (Vancouver)—gold;
• Silvercorp (Vancouver)—silver, copper, lead, zinc
• Sterling Group (Vancouver)—lithium and potash at salt lake in central Tibet; also involved in extracting lithium at another location in Qinghai. Lithium is in great demand for making batteries that power laptops, cameras, and numerous other devices. Tibet is one of the rare places on the planet where lithium deposits have been discovered.

DAM INSTRUMENTATION

• RocTest Ltd—Quebec-based company RocTest Ltd has been involved in supplying geotechnical instruments used in the building of large dams on the Yalong River in Sichuan, southwest China. These dams are not on the Tibetan plateau, but lie close to ethnic-Tibetan regions. RocTest was involved with the building of Ertan Dam on the Yalong, and more recently involved with Jinping 2 Dam on the same river. Jinping 2 Dam has a projected wall-height of 305 metres, making it one of the world's tallest dams.
• SC-Lavalin, an engineering company from Quebec, was contracted to install Energy Management Systems used to monitor and control the Sichuan province power transmission network.

Map of Canadian Joint-Venture Operations
on the Tibetan plateau:

(click to enlarge)