Race to the Bottom? : A Critical Analysis of Canada's Modern Slavery in Supply Chain Legislation

Abstract

This study critically examines the Government of Canada's conceptualization of transnational corporate accountability and exploitative labour in its legislative response to modern slavery in global supply chains. With a primary focus on the government's recently proposed Bill S-216: Modern Slavery Act - which would mandate companies to report on their activities to reduce modern slavery in their supply chains - empirical data is drawn from parliamentary debates about this bill and its earlier iterations as well as a report produced by the House of Commons committee originally charged with studying the issue. Informed by the corporate crime and business management literature as well as a neo-Marxist theoretical lens that employs such concepts as Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and global capitalism, the dominant views taken up in conversations hosted by the Canadian state are captured using critical discourse analysis. Overall, dominant voices accepted into the federal government's approach reinforce neoliberal assumptions of wealth accumulation, profit maximization, and free-market economies, thereby trusting transnational corporations to self-regulate and use their financial capital to curb the conditions that engender exploitative labour. The findings of this interdisciplinary study reveal that the legislative proposal culminating from the policy-making discourse defers to measures that prioritize the social benefits of corporate social responsibility, which ultimately eclipse the need for criminal sanctions against Canadian corporations with operations that employ modern slavery. This research helps to expose the reproduction of corporate impunity as a result of the inability/unwillingness to address the status quo of global capitalism.