Vancouver City Hall.
Vancouver City Hall. Credit: Thomas Roessler / Wikimedia Commons Credit: Thomas Roessler / Wikimedia Commons

Since 2005, the City of Vancouver has had on its books an “ethical purchasing policy (EEP).”

Its preamble sounds serious and progressive, opening with this ringing statement of principle: “The goal of the City of Vancouver’s Ethical Purchasing Policy (EPP) is to ensure that all suppliers to the City meet, at a minimum, the performance standards outlined in the Supplier Code of Conduct, which includes core labour conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO).”

Sadly, it turns out that the city has never actively enforced its EPP policy, and city staff seem to have recently told city council that it would be too expensive to do so, and not worth the expense. This is particularly disturbing given the fact that in at least two instances, factories listed by the city as approved suppliers in March of 2021 were credibly accused of abusive practices that led to worker deaths. The two Haitian factories  failed to forward health insurance fees deducted from worker salaries to the appropriate health insurance program, leading to seriously ill workers being denied health care and subsequently dying. These deaths and the abuse of worker rights that led to them did not become known to the City of Vancouver until concerned citizens brought this lethal oversight to the attention of city. There is, currently,  without a shift to more active enforcement, no reason to be certain that other suppliers on the city’s list have not committed similar or more egregious abuses of workers.

When asked about the lethal factories appearing on the city’s list, staff first said that the city had not sourced any products from them, then said that Vancouver had purchased a few shirts, but the issue was now resolved. Indeed, it had been, but not thanks to any action by the city. The NGO Workers Rights Consortium identified the issues in Haiti, and local activists brought them to the attention of city staff. This seems to me like an argument for active enforcement, not against it. And this preference at Vancouver city hall for passive EPP enforcement is being maintained as the garment industry sweatshops continue to kill workers. For more background on sweat shops and human rights abuses,  take a look at the website of the Maquiladora Solidarity Network.

The need for active enforcement of an EPP policy is still strong, and the City of Vancouver is ignoring it. We should all be speaking out and encouraging prompt and effective action.

The adoption of the city’s  policy  in 2005  was the result of extensive lobbying by a group of Vancouver and Canadian labour and human rights groups, ably supported by then city Councillor Tim Louis, who championed the policy.

But over the past few years some of the activists who first promoted this policy, which was designed to send signals back down the supply chain discouraging sweatshop labour abuses, endemic then and now in the garment industry, was not being actively enforced. (Full disclosure. I was part of the original lobby for this policy, and I have played a small role in recent attempts to improve the enforcement of the city’s policy.)

The city bureaucrats responsible for the ethical purchasing policy since 2005 have taken a passive, complaints-based approach to enforcing the EPP, relying upon workers or their advocates in third world countries to find out about the existence of the Vancouver policy and then to undertake the dangers of whistle blowing and face possible reprisals from employers. How has that worked out? Spoiler alert, not well.

The evidence is to be found in the annual reports to council about the EPP from the city’s procurement department. Once I was alerted to possible problems with how well the EPP was being enforced, I read through the annual reports for nearly a decade and a half without finding any mention of concrete action meant  to give the EPP enforcement teeth, although, to be fair, the reports did record some laudable reforms in terms of green purchasing and, perhaps ironically, the city’s adoption of a living wage policy.  I contacted procurement staff to ask  some questions: “How often had the city conducted factory visits to the countries where uniforms for civic employees were made? What contacts had they made with union organizers in those countries, and/or with social justice NGOs concerned with worker safety and human rights? How many complaints had they received and how were they resolved?”.. and so forth. I was told the questions were too large and difficult to answer. When I followed up with a formal Freedom of Information application with a similar set of questions, I was told that I could have the information I requested …. Once I had paid $150,000 in fees! I guess the city has a different understanding of the phrase “freedom of information” than I do.

As it happens, when city councillors who sympathized with the idea of enforcing the policy made the same information request to staff, in short order they were provided with an answer- the city had done none of the active steps described in the questions.

Councillors Jean Swanson and Christine Boyle initiated a resolution last year that directed staff to report back on several suggestions for more robustly enforcing the city’s policy about not buying goods from sweatshop factories. The resulting report, as noted above, essentially argued that nothing new should be done to give the policy teeth, apparently on the argument the city was only doing business with lethally oppressive businesses occasionally, and it would take too much effort and investment to stop.

This discouraging word from staff was delivered to  a newly elected city council in Vancouver, a council dominated by a business friendly,  centre-right ABC  majority led by Mayor Ken Sim. It is unlikely that this new majority will take serious action to enforce the city’s EPP unless they hear a lot about the issue from the public.

If you think that the City of Vancouver should take concrete steps to identify labour and human rights abuses by its suppliers and either get those abuses stopped or stop doing business with the abusers, please let Mayor and Council know of your concerns at https://vancouver.ca/your-government/contact-council.aspx

And please circulate this column to your networks and urge others to tell council to do the right thing!

Tom Sandborn

Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver. He is a widely published free lance writer who covered health policy and labour beats for the Tyee on line for a dozen years,...