Doing business with undemocratic regimes

Geoffrey York wrote in The high cost of doing business with undemocratic regimes (Folio, Globe and Mail, March 21, 2011) what a great many Canadians have been saying privately for a long time. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where Human Rights Watch estimated in 2009 that 200,000 women and girls had been raped since 1998, as Mr. York stated, is Canada’s top African investment portfolio at $3.34 billion. Putting retirement savings into ethical business funds as my wife and I do is only part of the solution. Canada should introduce regulations to make sure that our companies do not engage in practices abroad that would be illegal here, and compel them to disclose tax and revenue paid to foreign governments , as the USA has done in the recently-passed Dodd-Frank bill.