My friend Andrew Crane, a leading York University business ethics professor and director of the Schulich School of Business‘s Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business, provided a very thoughtful and incisive counterpoint to oil industry spokesperson Kathryn Marshall on CBC Radio’s The Current program on December 6, 2011. The two debated “Ethical Oil,” a slick oil industry marketing campaign dressed up to look like grassroots activism. Building on right-wing commentator Ezra Levant‘s 2009 book of the same name, the central ploy of this campaign is to portray tar sands oil from Canada as a more ethical choice than oil from, say, Russia, the Sudan, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, because it is produced in a liberal democracy with robust protections for human rights and the rule of law.  While the Canadian oil patch may have a better human rights record than those in some repressive regimes, Andy pointed out that branding tar sands petroleum as “Ethical Oil” is unhelpful for several reasons.

Barrick Gold’s lawsuit against the authors and publisher of the book Noir Canada: pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique, a French language exposé of the practices of Canadian mining companies in Africa, has been settled out of court.

(See Barrick Gold’s press release, a Le Devoir news story (in French), and a story in the Winnipeg Free Press)

The defamation lawsuit was a classic example of a “SLAPP” – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, employed by powerful individuals and corporations to intimidate critics and stifle scrutiny of their actions, typically by claiming that the criticism amounts to libel or slander. Such lawsuits have been employed in efforts to silence indigenous people, environmentalists, labour groups, human rights activists and others who try to oppose logging, mining, resource extraction, pollution, dam-building, and other activities that they believe are harming or may harm health, safety, welfare, or ecological integrity in affected communities.

What should we make of Mattel‘s October 5, 2011 announcement of new “sustainable sourcing” principles for its paper toy packaging? The move came after a highly-publicized Greenpeace campaign featuring Ken and Barbie “breakup” videos on the internet and huge banners draped from Mattel’s Los Angeles headquarters declaring, “Barbie: It’s Over. I don’t date girls that are into deforestation.”

Greenpeace banner on Mattel HQ, June 2011 (Greenpeace)

The principles commit Mattel to some significant concrete steps.

Under Mattel’s new policy, 70% of its paper packaging will be harvested sustainably or recycled by the end of 2011, rising to 85% in 2015, with preference for paper certified under the Forest Stewardship Council program for sustainable forestry certification.  The company has also directed all its suppliers to exit known controversial sources of paper fibre. It has committed to avoid such sources in the future by ensuring that fibre sources are known and traced throughout the supply chain, fibre is harvested in compliance with local laws, and is not harvested from old-growth forests, from forests recently converted to timber plantations, or in ways that violate internationally recognized indigenous rights.

Three years ago I was involved as an observer in the drafting of the ISO 26000 guide on Social Responsibility. The guide was prepared by an international working group of 450 representatives of business, labour, government, NGOs and other interests from 99 countries and 42 international organizations.  The early drafts of the guide contained language suggesting that an organization’s responsibility to do something about human rights varies with (among other things) its ability to influence the perpetrators of human rights violations. One passage, for example, stated that

“there will be situations where an organization’s ability to influence others will be accompanied by a responsibility to exercise that influence…. Generally, the responsibility for exercising influence increases with the ability to influence.”

This struck me as intuitively right. Companies (and other organizations) often have special relationships either with third parties who are in a position to violate human rights (governments, suppliers, security contractors, etc.), or those whose rights are violated (employees, local community members, etc.).