Corporate Governance
Ethical Sourcing
Being a responsible Mint means having a strong, ethical approach to corporate governance. Our north star is accountability on all sides, including how we source materials, manufacture our products and choose our business partners. Ensuring the precious metals industry is responsible is a complex task that demands the transparency and collaboration of partners around the globe. The Mint is doing its part by upholding stringent principles of responsible sourcing. Our Responsible Metals program — which has been accredited by the LBMA, the world’s authority on precious metals — is designed to address the risks spelled out by the OECD and its continually evolving due diligence guidance on responsible supply chains. Among those risks are serious abuses in the extraction, transport or trade of minerals, bribery, fraud, money laundering and support of armed groups.
Our approach relies on strong management systems, risk assessment and mitigation, third-party auditing and public accountability; it also includes a confidential whistleblowing program to report wrongdoing in the Mint’s chain of operations. As an extension of our commitment to ethical sourcing, the Mint is one of a small handful of gold refiners participating in LBMA’s international Gold Bar Integrity pilot project. The program uses blockchain-backed ledgers to trace the integrity, provenance and chain of custody of the global gold supply.
Procurement Process
In a similar vein, we’ve overhauled our procurement process and contract management guidelines to be able to strategically demand that our partners hit certain sustainability metrics, which ultimately helps us build a more sustainable supply chain from end-to-end.
Protecting supply chains from bad actors isn’t the only area on which the Mint is focused. Our big-picture ESG commitments include identifying opportunities to improve work conditions for Indigenous and women miners, as well as funding research and development into more sustainable and environmentally friendly processes — for instance, developing more responsible electroplating solutions, dramatically reducing chlorine use in refining and investing in a blanking process called “flaring” that significantly reduces metal waste in bi-metallic coin production.
“About 60 per cent of the Mint’s capital investments are in systems and technologies that will make us more sustainable overall,” says Francis Mensah, Vice-President, Finance & Administration and Chief Financial Officer.
