The Hotline That Disappeared
How Canada’s forced labour disclosure system produces silence — and who it protects
By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | Working Draft — For Review
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I.
Nestlé Canada told the federal government it was monitoring forced labour risks at a palm oil supplier’s plantation in Malaysia. A worker hotline had been seeded. Recruitment practices were being tracked. A CEO put his name to it.
A year later, every mention of Malaysia had vanished from the global human rights report Nestlé cited as evidence. The hotline — gone. The supplier — gone. The country — gone. No explanation was offered. None was required.
Canada’s government, which received the original filing, never asked why.
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II. What the Law Requires
Canada’s Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act came into force January 1, 2024. It requires companies of a certain size that produce, sell, distribute, or import goods into Canada to file an annual report with the federal government describing what steps they are taking to identify and reduce forced labour risk in their supply chains.
The reports are signed by a senior officer — in most cases, the President or CEO of the Canadian entity. John McKay, the former Liberal MP who co-authored the legislation, is unambiguous about what that signature means. “It’s the same as an audit statement,” he said in a recent interview. “Same as a bank or stock exchange.” A CEO who signs a misleading disclosure isn’t making a public relations error. They are attesting, under law, to the accuracy of what their company has told the government of Canada.
The penalty for filing a false or misleading report is up to $250,000. It has never been imposed. Not once.
Public Safety Canada receives the filings. It does not verify them. It does not have a stated process for questioning their contents. It publishes them in an online catalogue and moves on. McKay, who watched his legislation come to life from the inside, does not mince words about what that has produced. The government, he said, is “unenthusiastic about analyzing the reports, and ideas of enforcement.”
The result is a system that looks like accountability and functions like a suggestion box.
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III. What Companies Are Telling the Government
To understand what Canadian companies are actually telling the government about their palm oil supply chains, you have to read the filings yourself. Public Safety Canada won’t do it for you.
Palm oil’s reach into the Canadian food system is wider than most people realize. In 2021, Canadian consumers noticed something had changed about their butter — it wasn’t softening at room temperature the way it always had. Bakers across the country reported the same thing. The culprit, eventually traced through the dairy supply chain, was palm oil-based feed supplements — specifically palmitic acid, a saturated fat derived from palm oil — being added to dairy cow feed to boost milk fat production. The fat composition of the milk had changed, and so had the butter. The Dairy Farmers of Canada recommended farmers stop the practice and struck a working group. What the episode made visible, briefly, was something that had been happening without public awareness for years: palm oil derivatives of unknown origin entering the Canadian food system through a route — animal feed — that no border agency was monitoring and no disclosure law was designed to capture. The scandal had a name. Nobody asked where the palm oil came from.
Over the past several months, The Old Guardian reviewed three years of mandatory S-211 reports from confirmed Canadian palm oil importers — companies that, according to the federal government’s own Canadian Importers Database, bring more than $311 million in palm oil and palm-derived products into Canada annually from Malaysia and Indonesia. The US Department of Labor lists palm oil from both countries as produced with forced and child labour. The ILO estimates that 80 percent of Malaysia’s 451,000 oil palm plantation workers are documented migrants, predominantly Indonesian, working in conditions that international monitors have repeatedly flagged for debt bondage, wage theft, and passport confiscation.
What the filings show is a spectrum of disclosure — from companies that named specific countries, specific suppliers, and specific programs, to companies that produced boilerplate so generic it could have been written by anyone about anything. What they share, almost universally, is a single conclusion: nothing was found.
Cargill Limited named Malaysia explicitly and described a labour transformation program with the Earthworm Foundation. Kellanova Canada — the company behind Pringles, Pop-Tarts, and Eggo waffles — named both Malaysia and Indonesia as high-risk sourcing countries for palm oil in all three years of filing, consistent and specific. Mondelez Canada named both countries and cited ILO forced labour indicators — then disclosed it had taken no remediation measures whatsoever, using identical language across multiple filings, raising questions about whether each successive report was simply a copy of the last.
Ferrero Canada, whose products include Nutella — which lists palm oil as its second ingredient — filed multiple years with a “CONFIDENTIAL” stamp on a document that is supposed to be a mandatory public disclosure. Its 2025 filing still carried the title of its 2022–2023 report on the cover. All years concluded that no slavery had been identified and no remediation steps had been taken.
Bunge Canada and its subsidiary Bunge Loders Croklaan Canada — a specialty fats processor that explicitly imports tropical oils including palm — named no source countries in any filing, described no specific incidents, and offered no concrete remediation.
Colgate-Palmolive Canada did not mention palm oil in its first two years of filing. In year three, the company named it explicitly as a priority risk commodity and disclosed an active public palm oil grievance log and no-buy list — a more substantive disclosure than most of its peers. Buried in the same filing was an admission that the company had specifically focused its human rights due diligence assessment efforts on “agricultural supply chains associated with our Hill’s Pet Nutrition business.” Hill’s Pet Nutrition Canada — a Colgate-Palmolive subsidiary whose products contain palm-derived ingredients — filed independently in year one, vanished from the Public Safety catalogue entirely in year two, and reappeared in year three only as a co-author on the Colgate-Palmolive Canada filing. That three-year arc — present, absent, reabsorbed — passed without comment from any government authority.
Kellanova Canada’s year-three filing introduces a separate accountability question. The filing was submitted under the name “Kellanova Canada Inc.” and signed by the company’s Legal Director — the second consecutive year the disclosure has been signed at that level rather than by the President. What the filing does not acknowledge is that Kellanova Canada no longer exists as an independent entity. Mars, Incorporated completed its acquisition of Kellanova in late 2024. The year-three S-211 filing was made months after that acquisition closed, under a corporate name that had ceased to exist, with no reference to Mars anywhere in the document. Who bears legal responsibility for S-211 obligations post-acquisition is unresolved and undisclosed. Canada has not asked.
Then there are the two filings that stand apart from the rest — not for what they disclosed, but for what they stopped disclosing.
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IV. The Disappearing Disclosures
Nestlé Canada’s 2024 S-211 filing — covering the 2023 fiscal year, signed by CEO and President John Carmichael — contains a specific disclosure buried in its supply chain section. The company was, it said, “sponsoring the development of an open-source due diligence toolkit for palm oil suppliers globally and seeding a third-party worker hotline in one of its palm oil supplier’s plantations in Malaysia that enables workers to safely report on working conditions, recruitment, safety and other rights abuses.”
A plantation in Malaysia. A specific supplier. A worker hotline. A CEO’s signature.
Nestlé’s 2025 filing — covering 2024, again signed by Carmichael — contains the same sentence, word for word. The disclosure appears intact. But Nestlé’s filings don’t stand alone. They reference the company’s global Non-Financial Statement as supporting evidence — the document that is supposed to show the work behind the words.
The 2024 Non-Financial Statement mentions Malaysia six times. It describes the hotline. It names the broker certification program. It identifies Malaysia as a high-priority geography for palm oil due diligence.
The 2025 Non-Financial Statement does not mention Malaysia once. The hotline is gone. The broker certification is gone. The palm oil supplier program is gone. No explanation is provided anywhere in the document for why a program significant enough to be disclosed in a CEO-attested legal filing had apparently ceased to exist — or ceased to be disclosed.
Nestlé’s year-three filing, covering 2025, maintains CEO-level signatory and continues to reference palm oil as a priority sourcing risk. The Malaysian hotline does not reappear. No explanation for its absence has been offered in any year.
Has Public Safety Canada noticed? Has anyone in the federal government asked Nestlé what happened to the hotline, and to the workers it was designed to protect?
The workers that hotline was supposed to protect — migrant labourers on a Malaysian plantation, far enough from home that a third-party reporting channel was considered necessary to keep them safe — do not appear anywhere in any of these documents. They never did. What appeared, and then disappeared, was the program designed to reach them.
Nestlé was asked to explain the discrepancy. As of publication, the company had not responded.
This is not the first time Nestlé has faced scrutiny over forced labour in its agricultural commodity supply chains. For more than 15 years, Nestlé USA fought a lawsuit in the American courts brought by six Malian citizens who alleged they were trafficked into Ivory Coast as child slaves to produce cocoa — on farms Nestlé sourced from and provided with financial and technical support. The case — heard alongside a parallel suit against Cargill, also a confirmed Canadian palm oil importer — reached the US Supreme Court in 2021. The court dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds, finding that the forced labour had not occurred on US soil. The court did not rule that Nestlé was unaware of the conditions on those farms. It ruled that awareness, exercised from US soil, was insufficient to invoke federal jurisdiction. The six plaintiffs received no remedy.
The pattern is not limited to one commodity or one country. In its cocoa supply chain, Nestlé faced allegations of knowingly sourcing from farms using child slave labour. In its palm oil supply chain, a worker protection program at a Malaysian plantation has quietly disappeared from its global human rights reporting. In both cases, the company has faced no legal consequence. In both cases, the workers at the end of the supply chain have been left without recourse.
Canada has received Nestlé Canada’s disclosures. It has asked no questions.
Archer-Daniels-Midland’s Canadian subsidiary, ADM Agri-Industries Company, is a confirmed importer of hydrogenated vegetable fats into Canada. Its 2024 S-211 filing — signed by Kevin Wright, President of ADM Agri-Industries — contains a disclosure that is unlike anything else in the Public Safety catalogue.
In a section describing grievance mechanisms, the filing states that US Customs and Border Protection had raised allegations of human rights violations involving suppliers in ADM’s palm oil supply chain. ADM’s own publicly available grievance log confirms the specifics. Grievance ID 164: FGV Holdings Berhad, a Malaysian palm oil producer, reported by US CBP for deforestation and human rights violations. Grievance ID 210: Sime Darby Plantation, another Malaysian producer, reported by US CBP for human rights violations. Both were subjects of US Withhold Release Orders — the American enforcement mechanism that blocks goods from entering the United States on forced labour grounds. Both were in ADM’s supply chain when those orders were active.
ADM disclosed this to the Canadian government in a CEO-attested legal filing. It was the only company in the entire S-211 catalogue to disclose that a foreign enforcement authority had already flagged human rights violations in its palm oil supply chain.
Canada did nothing with that disclosure.
ADM’s 2025 filing — signed not by the President of ADM Agri-Industries but by Regina Bynote Jones, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of the US parent company — contains no mention of the CBP allegations. No mention of FGV. No mention of Sime Darby. No mention of the grievance log. The disclosure that should have triggered a review had been quietly removed, replaced with boilerplate language about prison labour risks. The year-three filing, again signed by the global CLO and buried as a three-paragraph appendix in a multi-jurisdictional document that also covers the UK, Australia, and California, maintains the same silence. For the second consecutive year, ADM’s Canadian disclosure contains nothing that would require Canada to act.
It is worth noting what ADM’s global 2025 disclosure does acknowledge: that in 2024, independent media reports linked the company to the use of involuntary prison labour at two US facilities. ADM initiated an internal review, concluded it could not confirm full alignment with ILO standards, and began phasing out the program. That remediation disclosure — an actual finding, an actual response — is notable precisely because it is so rare in this corpus. It also does not appear in the Canadian section. Canada received the appendix. The accountability went elsewhere.
A year earlier, ADM told Canada’s government that US customs authorities had found human rights violations in its palm oil supply chain. The following year, ADM told Canada’s government nothing of the sort. No explanation was provided.
Did anyone ask why?
These are not isolated anomalies. They are a pattern. In both cases, a company made a specific, consequential disclosure in year one — the kind of disclosure the legislation was designed to surface — and removed it in subsequent years without explanation. In both cases, the government that received the original disclosure took no action.
The power to ask questions exists. Public Safety Canada has the filings. The discrepancies are visible to anyone who reads them side by side. The question is not whether Canada can demand an explanation. The question is why it hasn’t.
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V. The Enforcement Gap
The silence inside the S-211 catalogue has a mirror image at the border.
Since Canada’s forced labour import prohibition came into force in July 2020, the Canada Border Services Agency has detained approximately 48 shipments suspected of involving forced labour. Two were blocked in 2025. Seven were voluntarily re-exported by importers who apparently decided not to fight the detention. The rest were released.
In the same year, US Customs and Border Protection blocked 8,170 shipments under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act alone.
Zero fines have ever been issued under Canada’s import prohibition. Not one. The maximum penalty is $250,000 per violation. It has sat unused for five years.
None of the detained shipments involved palm oil. None of the blocked shipments involved palm oil. In five years of enforcement, not a single container of Malaysian or Indonesian palm oil — from a trade worth more than $311 million annually — has been detained, investigated, or flagged by Canadian border authorities.
This is not an accident. It is the predictable output of a system that was never pointed at palm oil.
CBSA does not independently investigate supply chains. It acts on intelligence provided by the Labour Program at Employment and Social Development Canada. ESDC conducts research and analysis on specific commodities and source countries, and shares those assessments with CBSA as the basis for enforcement action. As a CBSA official confirmed in Federal Court proceedings in 2022, it “works closely with ESDC to identify goods that have been produced by forced labour entering Canada,” and ESDC “conducts research and analysis on companies that are suspected to be using forced labour to produce goods and are importing them to Canada.” That research, the government acknowledged, can take six months or longer per complaint.
The system is complaint-driven. If no complaint is filed about a commodity, ESDC has no basis to research it. If ESDC produces no research, CBSA has no basis to act. And if CBSA never acts, nothing in the public record — no court decisions, no enforcement notices, no company names — ever surfaces to suggest the problem exists.
Palm oil has never triggered a formal complaint to ESDC’s Labour Program. Not when the US issued Withhold Release Orders against FGV Holdings in 2020. Not when Sime Darby was added to the list the same year. Not when ADM disclosed in a CEO-attested Canadian legal filing that US customs authorities had flagged both suppliers for human rights violations. Not when $311 million in annual palm oil imports continued to flow from the same geography the US had formally identified as tainted.
The Old Guardian has submitted formal evidence to ESDC’s Labour Program identifying FGV Holdings, Sime Darby, and their confirmed presence in Canadian import supply chains. ESDC has been asked whether any research on palm oil supply chains from Malaysia or Indonesia has ever been produced, and whether the ADM disclosure triggered any review. As of publication, ESDC had not responded.
The United States government has formed its own view of Canada’s enforcement record. The USTR’s 2026 National Trade Estimates report states explicitly that Canada “does not appear to be effectively enforcing its forced labor import prohibition, meaning goods made with forced labor may be able to enter and compete in Canada’s market.” Canada is now subject to a formal Section 301 investigation on that basis — the same legal mechanism the US uses to justify punitive tariffs against countries engaged in unfair trade practices.
John McKay, who built the legislative framework Canada is now being judged against, does not dispute the assessment. “I think so,” he said when asked whether the USTR’s finding reflected Canada’s enforcement reality. “I believe we do have a problem.” He added, with characteristic bluntness, that while the Americans are right, they are also “full of it” — their own enforcement record on forced labour is selective, politically driven, and in his view, hypocritical. “Trump could care less about forced labour,” McKay said. The Section 301 investigation is trade leverage dressed as human rights enforcement.
He is not wrong about the Americans. He is also not wrong about Canada.
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VI. The Architecture of Silence
It would be tempting to read the findings in this investigation as a story about bad corporate actors — companies gaming a weak system to avoid accountability. That reading is too generous to the system.
The more uncomfortable truth is that the system was not designed to catch what it appears to be catching. It was designed to produce paper. And it is doing that very well.
S-211 created a disclosure obligation, not a due diligence obligation. Companies are required to describe what they are doing to identify and reduce forced labour risk. They are not required to actually find it. They are not required to stop sourcing from suppliers where it exists. They are not required to prove anything. They are required to file a document, have a senior officer sign it, and submit it to a government department that will publish it without reading it.
The CEO signature — which McKay rightly compares to an audit attestation — carries legal weight that the system never activates. A misleading S-211 filing is technically a punishable offence. The maximum fine is $250,000. It has never been imposed. Public Safety Canada has never publicly questioned the content of a single filing. The $250,000 ceiling exists in the legislation the way a speed limit exists on a road with no police — theoretically binding, practically irrelevant.
The import prohibition operates in a separate lane entirely. S-211 filings do not trigger customs reviews. A company can disclose in a CEO-attested legal document that its Malaysian palm oil supplier was flagged by US customs authorities for human rights violations — as ADM did — and continue importing from that supplier the following day without any intervention from CBSA. The two systems share a government but not a conversation.
The enforcement mechanism that does exist is complaint-driven, resource-intensive, and structurally incapable of proactive enforcement at scale. ESDC requires six months or more to analyze a single complaint. It has no standing research program on palm oil. CBSA cannot act without ESDC’s intelligence. And the public record of enforcement — the court decisions, the detention notices, the company names — is effectively sealed unless an importer voluntarily drags it into the light by filing a lawsuit.
This creates a system with a specific and predictable output: companies that find nothing, governments that ask nothing, and workers whose conditions remain invisible to the country importing the products of their labour. The logic is circular and self-sealing. CBSA is not asking, so companies are structurally never made “aware.” And because companies are never aware, there is nothing to report. The 91 percent of S-211 filers who reported finding no forced or child labour in their supply chains are not describing an absence of exploitation. They are describing an absence of inquiry.
The certification schemes — RSPO membership, third-party audits, supplier codes of conduct — are themselves part of the architecture of reassurance rather than accountability. They provide cover, not verification. Nestlé’s year-three filing claims 100 percent of its global crude palm oil was from RSPO-certified sources or covered by book-and-claim credits. Book-and-claim is a purchasing offset — it does not mean the physical oil flowing through a Canadian supply chain is traceable to a certified plantation. The 100 percent claim is accurate under the RSPO’s own rules. It is also compatible with sourcing oil from a plantation where workers are having their passports confiscated.
The limits of that cover have been documented in detail. A 2025 investigation by Reuters found that 60 percent of complaints to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil involve operations that certified auditors had already visited without flagging any violations. The auditors are paid directly by the companies they audit — a structural conflict of interest that experts describe as endemic to the system. Critically, Reuters confirmed that independent auditors had not flagged any violations of worker rights on certified Sime Darby plantations prior to the US ban — meaning certification provided no early warning for one of the most significant forced labour enforcement actions in the palm oil sector’s history.
What the system cannot survive is honest accounting. If every Canadian company importing Malaysian or Indonesian palm oil reported truthfully — acknowledging that 80 percent of plantation workers are documented migrants working in conditions that international monitors have repeatedly flagged, that two major Malaysian producers were subject to US enforcement actions, that debt bondage and wage theft are documented and widespread — the S-211 catalogue would read like an indictment of an entire industry. Instead it reads like a corporate wellness report.
That is not an accident. It is the architecture.
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VII. The Co-Author’s Verdict
John McKay spent 27 years in the House of Commons. He did not seek re-election in 2025. He is no longer bound by caucus discipline or ministerial relationships, and he speaks about his own legislation with the candour that active politics rarely permits.
S-211, he is clear, was not a watered-down compromise. It was the strongest version of the bill that could be moved through Parliament. Previous attempts had failed entirely. Getting the disclosure obligation enshrined in law — getting CEOs to put their names to supply chain statements — was itself a significant achievement in a legislative environment where industry lobbying against supply chain transparency is vigorous and well-funded. “Direct conversations with ministers — your chances of getting your bill through are next to nothing,” McKay said. The bill that passed was the bill that could pass.
But he does not mistake what passed for what is needed. The legislation, he said, functions like a Voluntary Disclosure with teeth — companies are “more voluntold” than compelled, the CEO signature carries genuine legal weight, and the powers to seize records and compel responses exist in theory. The problem is not the instrument. The problem is that no one is picking it up.
“It’s more failure to enforce than lack of ability,” McKay said. The government has the tools. It is choosing not to use them.
He is equally direct about the political context in which that choice is being made. The Canadian government, he said, is “unenthusiastic about analyzing the reports, and ideas of enforcement.” That unenthusiasm has not gone unnoticed in Washington.
The US Trade Representative’s 2026 National Trade Estimates report states that Canada “does not appear to be effectively enforcing its forced labor import prohibition, meaning goods made with forced labor may be able to enter and compete in Canada’s market.” Canada is now formally named in a Section 301 investigation — the legal mechanism the US uses to justify punitive tariffs against countries it considers to be engaging in unfair trade practices. The April 28, 2026 USTR public hearing produced an even starker formulation: that Canada has not “adopted and effectively enforced a forced labor import prohibition to date.”
The investigation covers 60 economies. Canada is among them not because it tolerates forced labour domestically, but because Washington has concluded that Canada is not doing enough to keep forced-labour goods out of its own market — and that this creates an unlevel playing field for American producers competing against imports that carry no equivalent labour cost burden.
The stakes are not abstract. US Members of Congress have formally raised concern that goods rejected at the American border under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act are being diverted into Canada and re-exported back to the United States. A specific case involving solar panels — reportedly relabelled after US rejection and rerouted through Canada — was raised with Canadian ministers. Canada, in this framing, is not merely failing to enforce its own ban. It is functioning as a bypass route for goods that American enforcement has already flagged.
McKay is clear-eyed about what is driving Washington’s attention. “Trump could care less about forced labour,” he said. The Section 301 investigation is trade leverage, not human rights advocacy. The Americans are, in his assessment, “right and full of it” simultaneously — correct in their diagnosis of Canada’s enforcement failure, hypocritical in their deployment of that diagnosis as a tariff instrument. Their own enforcement record is selective, politically driven, and shaped by economic interest as much as moral conviction.
But the hypocrisy of the messenger does not change the accuracy of the message. Canada has a forced labour import prohibition. It is not enforcing it. And the commodity most visibly absent from that enforcement — flowing freely across Canadian borders at more than $311 million annually, from supply chains that American authorities have already acted against — is palm oil.
The question of what changes is where McKay and the advocates diverge. Bill C-251, introduced by Bloc MP Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay in October 2025, would create a rebuttable presumption of forced labour for goods from high-risk countries and sectors — shifting the burden of proof to the importer, as the US UFLPA does for Xinjiang goods. McKay is skeptical. “Bill C-251 is an illusion of a solution,” he said. “If S-211 is fully working, C-251 wouldn’t really be needed.”
His position is that the existing legislation already contains the tools required — the CEO attestation, the power to question disclosures, the connection to the import prohibition that a functioning enforcement system would activate. What is missing is not legal authority. What is missing is political will.
“If the government doesn’t call an importer to account,” McKay said, “it’s failing.”
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VIII.
Somewhere on a palm oil plantation in Malaysia, there was a worker hotline.
Nestlé Canada told the Canadian government about it. A CEO signed his name to the disclosure. The hotline existed to give migrant workers — people far from home, working in conditions that international monitors have documented as ripe for exploitation — a safe way to report what was happening to them.
Then the program disappeared from Nestlé’s global human rights reporting. No explanation was offered. The Canadian government, which had received the original disclosure, did not ask for one.
The workers on that plantation do not know that a Canadian law required their employer to tell the Canadian government about the hotline designed to protect them. They do not know that the same law gave Canada the tools to ask what happened to it. They do not know that Canada chose not to ask.
They probably do not know that more than $311 million in palm oil flows from their region into Canada every year. They do not know that two of the largest producers in their industry were subjects of American enforcement actions for human rights violations, that those violations were disclosed in mandatory Canadian government filings by a Canadian importer, and that Canada did nothing with that information.
They do not know that the country importing the products of their labour looked at the evidence and looked away.
Canada’s forced labour import prohibition has been in force for five years. The Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act has been in force for three. The tools exist. The evidence exists. The authority exists.
What does not exist — what has never existed in five years of enforcement, in three years of mandatory disclosure, in $311 million of annual trade from supply chains that America has already acted against — is a single Canadian enforcement action targeting palm oil.
The hotline is gone. Nobody asked why. That is the story.
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