By Sarah Teich, David Matas, and John Packer, August 17, 2026
When Ottawa announces that a federal office is being eliminated, the instinctive reaction of many Canadians these days is relief. After a decade in which the federal government grew faster than the economy that pays for it, “thank goodness” is an understandable response to almost any cut.
But the elimination this summer of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise, known as the CORE, deserves a closer look. This was not a redundant agency trimmed in the name of efficiency: it was the only body of its kind in Canada, it was quietly doing work that served both Canadian values and Canadian interests, and the federal government shut it down at the very moment the costs of looking soft on forced labour began landing on Canada’s doorstep in the form of American tariffs.
We write from direct experience. In June 2022, a coalition of 28 civil society organizations, among them Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, Canadians in Support of Refugees in Dire Need, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, brought 14 complaints to the CORE. The complaints presented evidence that major apparel brands and mining companies operating in Canada had operations or supply chains in China that used or benefited from Uyghur forced labour. Two of us (Teich and Matas) served as lead counsel to the complainants while one of us (Packer) then directed a co-applicant.
The CORE acted on our complaints. In 2023, it published initial assessment reports and opened investigations into several of the companies named. These were the first investigations the office had ever launched. Six of our complaints were resolved during the tenure of the first ombudsperson, Sheri Meyerhoffer, and a seventh under the interim ombudsperson, Masud Husain. Then, in May 2025, Husain’s term ended and the government simply never appointed a replacement. Without an ombudsperson, our remaining six complaints froze, five in the investigation stage and one in mediation. This summer, Ottawa eliminated the office altogether. At least 36 complaints, including those six of ours, were awaiting decisions when the doors closed.
To understand what was lost, it helps to recall why the office existed. Canadian firms operate around the world in extractives, energy, and garments, often in places with weak local protections for workers and communities. For more than a decade, civil society pressed Ottawa to take responsibility for what Canadian companies do abroad, a case sharpened by disasters such as the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,134 garment workers, some of them making clothing for brands sold in Canada. Before the CORE, the only Canadian channel for such concerns was the National Contact Point for Responsible Business Conduct (NCP), an OECD mediation mechanism that advocates had long found wanting. The CORE was created by Order in Council of April 8, 2019 precisely to go beyond the NCP, with a mandate to receive complaints, investigate the conduct of Canadian companies abroad, and report publicly on what it found.
No other Canadian instrument combines what became the CORE’s defining features. It was complaint-driven, giving affected workers, communities, and civil society organizations a door to knock on. It addressed conduct abroad, whether or not a single affected good ever crossed the Canadian border. It covered the full range of human rights, including environmental harm, abuses connected to security forces, and Indigenous rights, not forced labour alone. And it was non-judicial and arm’s length, offering a route to accountability short of litigation.
The government’s first justification for eliminating the office is that it was ineffective, and on the public record the ledger admittedly looks thin. Over its life the office launched only a handful of investigations, and only one led to published recommendations. But the public ledger does not capture what the office actually did. As counsel to the coalition’s 14 complaints, we engaged with companies through the CORE process, and in a number of matters companies took the complaints seriously. The private meetings and negotiations that followed produced concrete commitments to address forced labour in operations and supply chains. This helped protect affected labour, consumers and the companies. Confidentiality undertakings prevent us from disclosing specifics, but we can say in the aggregate, without identifying any company or case, that the CORE was a truly useful mechanism for moving the needle on forced labour and that its quiet leverage on corporate behaviour was real and impactful. We would have told the government as much, had anyone asked. Moreover, we are confident some companies appreciated, and would have confirmed, that the process helped them meet their corporate social responsibility. In short, the CORE worked.
To judge the CORE only by its published output, and then to abolish it, mistakes the absence of paperwork for the absence of effect. Where the office did fall short, the cause was not the model but the starvation of it. Ottawa started late and slowly, underfunded the office, withheld the power to compel evidence it had originally been promised, and left the top job vacant for more than a year, which froze its work. It is hard to credit a complaint about effectiveness from the same government that withheld the tools effectiveness required.
The second justification given for closing CORE is that it duplicated the National Contact Point, a government-run complaint and mediation mechanism established by Ottawa in 2000 to ensure compliance with the OECD’s responsible business standards. We have worked extensively with the NCP, and it is a capable facilitator of mediation. But it does not conduct investigations, does not issue investigation reports, and was never designed to do either. To call the CORE duplicative of the NCP is to confuse a mediation service with an accountability mechanism. It also inverts the history, since the NCP’s inadequacy in that realm is the very reason the CORE was created. Yet the NCP is now where the orphaned complaints are being sent, if they are not simply closed.
The third justification is that Canada’s forced labour regime is being strengthened in parallel, chiefly through Bill C-35, tabled on June 12, 2026. The bill is an import control statute. It would let the Minister of Foreign Affairs list goods, including by country or region, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect forced labour, and require would-be importers of listed goods to demonstrate to customs officers that their goods are clean. It resembles the American system of Withhold Release Orders that preceded the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and as a border tool it is a commendable first step. But as a replacement for the CORE it fails on every count that matters. It reaches only goods crossing the Canadian border, while much of the harm the CORE addressed involves no import to Canada at all, including mineral exploration in Xinjiang that featured in our own complaints. It covers forced labour alone, leaving environmental degradation, displacement, and violations of Indigenous rights untouched. And it gives affected people next to nothing: rather than providing victims with a formal complaint mechanism, everything turns on a discretionary list that does not yet exist, that the government will control, and that officials have so far declined to say would include high-risk industries in China.
The courts, for their part, have already weighed in on the underlying principle. In Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya, the Supreme Court of Canada allowed Eritrean workers to sue a Canadian mining company in Canadian courts over forced labour they alleged at the company’s mine in Eritrea. Canadian law, in other words, already accepts that our companies can be made to answer at home for how they treat people abroad. But litigation, in the small fraction of cases where it is even available, takes years with prohibitive costs, well out of reach for most of the people affected by Canadian operations overseas. The CORE was the accessible version of this principle, and the only one most victims will ever be able to use. With experience and demonstrating over time its utility, the CORE would also have delivered a preventive effect.
While Bill C-35, if implemented correctly, will help ensure that Canadian shelves are free of products made with forced labour, the CORE was supposed to ensure that Canadian companies operating abroad continued to respect Canadian values and the rule of law. We need both. If the government will not restore the office, it should at minimum give the NCP the investigatory powers it lacks. What it should not do is pretend that the office made no difference, that it mattered little, or that anything else now on the books can do its work.
There is also another important function that the CORE was serving. It was an innovative and unique institution found nowhere else in the world. Other countries tend to rely on late, costly, and public judicial mechanisms. The CORE operated differently – focused on co-operative problem-solving. As the Carney government actively seeks to diversify Canadian trade relations, there are likely to be more Canadian corporations operating abroad in problematical contexts. A specially tailored non-judicial recourse available to address situations abroad would be in Canada’s interest and was a good example for the rest of the world.
It would also be a good way to demonstrate to allies and trading partners alike that Canada polices forced labour seriously. That demonstration may now carry a price tag. In July, following a Section 301 investigation that found Canada’s enforcement of its forced labour import ban wanting, the United States imposed a 10 per cent surtax on Canadian goods. Skeptics have called that move a pretext, one more front in a broader trade war, and they may be right. But a pretext needs truth to hang on, and Canada supplied it. Our forced labour import ban has produced just two refused shipments since 2020, while American customs refused entry to more than six thousand in 2024 alone. Both things can be true, and only one of them is in Ottawa’s control. A credible enforcement record, of which the CORE was a working part, is the best answer.
In the end, what our companies do abroad does not stay abroad; it comes home as our reputation. Moreover, as Canada strives to reconcile its principles with the challenges of diversifying economic relations, we need effective mechanisms through which we can credibly walk our talk. That is worth far more than the modest budget Ottawa just saved in axing the CORE.
Sarah Teich and David Matas are co-founders of Human Rights Action Group (HRAG) and served as lead counsel to the coalition of complainants before the CORE. Their firsthand observations are stated in the aggregate and should not be taken to imply anything about any one company.
John Packer is a board member of HRAG, and a former director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa (one of the coalition of complainants).
