Ghana posting provides vantage point to view mining and media

Consumers of mass media are getting a misleading picture of how Canadian mining companies are behaving in African nations, according to a master’s student in communications and social justice currently stationed in Ghana.

“A lot of the mainstream media coverage doesn’t paint a complete picture of how companies are representing Canadians abroad,” Sheena Cameron said during a telephone interview from Accra, the West African nation’s capital, where she’s been staying since last August. “In the newspapers I’m looking at, most of the coverage of these companies is found in the business section and it’s always about earnings and market share and never about the environmental and social implications of their work.”

Cameron, the recipient of an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, will return to Windsor in May where she plans to complete her thesis, tentatively titled Extracting an Ounce of Truth: Mainstream Media Coverage of Canadian Mining Neoliberalism, under the tutelage of professor Jim Winterin the Department of Communication, Media and Film.

Canadian mining corporations, according to Cameron, are no different from many other multinational coporations operating in Africa that capitalize on expanded markets and take advantage of laxer laws on social obligations and environmental precautions.

“They don’t have to abide by the same regulations they would have to follow in Canada,” she said, adding that Bill C-300, a private member’s bill which would have held Canadian mining companies abroad accountable to the same laws they’d adhere to at home, was narrowly defeated in the House of Commons last fall.

The voices of critics who suggest that mining might have environmental or health effects that are detrimental to the communities in which they operate usually go unheard, said Cameron.

“People who are trying to shed light on these issues are often marginalized or demonized,” she said, adding that governments of African nations are reluctant to speak up about issues because of the revenue they receive from those companies and the employment opportunities they provide. And many Canadians, she believes, are indifferent to those concerns because the return on many of their investments in pension and mutual funds are tied to the profits of those companies.

Besides talking with local activists, NGOs and community groups such as Breaking the Silence Solidarity Network, Cameron—originally from Miramichi, New Brunswick—hopes to interview mining company executives as part of her research. She also plans to examine how the Canadian government has responded to allegations of corporate wrongdoing in foreign nations.