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As a Balikbayan sometimes you re confronted by a situation that

Summary: As a Balikbayan sometimes you re confronted by a situation that makes you embarrassed to have a Canadian passport This last Christmas season was pretty crushing for both the Filipino and Canadian in me I mean what do you say to a Filipino community where the air food and water are poisoned Where almost everyone has heavy metal poisoning Where many are suffering horrible symptoms children are being born with physical and metal illness and some are even loosing limbs to it what do you say when the reason for all this ties back to Canada I spent this past Christmas season on the island of Marinduque the site of one of the world s greatest mining disasters and in Zamboanga del Norte where another Canadian company is accused of major human rights offences In the movie Blood Diamond you see how the world s love affair with diamonds resulted in conflict displacement and a lot of lost limbs and lives Conflict diamonds are a massive cause celeb these days with Kanye West hogging airtime to rant political For us Filipino s our conflict diamonds is a much more common product gold Like diamonds gold mining is responsible for the same sort of conflict militarization displacement and loss of limbs and lives For us Fil Cans this gold issue hits even closer to home The Philippines is ranked second to South Africa in production per unit of land area Gold is found throughout the islands and mining is one of the centre pieces of the government s economic strategy Canada is one of the world s top mining countries and the Toronto Stock Exchange with 60 of the world s mining listings is one of the world s three top financial centres for mining with Melbourne and London Large scale mining is recognised as one of the most problematic ventures in the world Where ever there is a large scale mine there are community accusations of human rights abuse and livelihood and environmental destruction Marinduque was depressing There were three major toxic spills on this island 1 Calancan Bay where 200 million metric tones of mine tailings were purposefully dumped into the ocean at surface level This dumping continued 24 hours a day from 1975 to 1991 2 the Boac River where a dam breach spilled 3 4 metric tones of tailings in 1996 3 the Mogpog river had a similar spill in 1991 This mine closed down in 1996 but the health and environmental problems linger Heavy metal poisoning is rampant throughout the island and none of the sites have been fully rehabilitated Sometimes when the wind picks up the toxic mine waste is blown about the locals call this their snow from Canada While there for Christmas I thought about the toy recall incident from last year when toys made in Asia were chastised for their lead content and possible health risks In the Philippines the health risk from heavy metals is not a possibility but a fact and it s source is the West often from Canada And Marinduque is not an isolated incident Even without accidents mining causes huge problems for the local communities And the supposed economic benefits are difficult to see Few jobs are created around large scale mining and many are lost Worse still the money made from this mining doesn t even stay in the Philippines as the government grants companies long tax holidays and allows for 100 foreign ownership and 100 repatriation of capital and profits Image Search Content inclusion

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