Update: Publish What You Pay - Reporting By The Canadian Mining Industry

On January 16, 2014, the Resource Revenue Transparency Working Group (comprising the Mining Association of Canada, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada and two non-governmental organizations) released its recommendations for the development of a payment transparency standard for all publicly traded mining companies in Canada. This comes seven months after Canada (NRCan) announced that it was committed to establishing new mandatory reporting standards for Canadian extractive companies to improve transparency of payments made to governments worldwide.

The recommendations provide that publicly traded mining companies in Canada would be required to disclose project-level payments to domestic (including national and sub-national authorities) and foreign governments. The recommendations do not address payments made to Aboriginal governments (although inclusion of such payments is anticipated to be part of the NRCan initiative). Large mining companies would