A Just & Peaceful Foreign Policy
Canadian foreign policy too often serves the same corporations and elites it's supposed to hold accountable, extracting resources from the Global South, arming governments that abuse human rights, and standing idly by as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank make loans to low-income countries that will trap them in the cycle of poverty.
Making working people's lives harder, making the world more dangerous and chaotic, and worsening the climate crisis, all the while creating the conditions from which people are forced to migrate to countries like Canada. New Democrats believe Canada's place in the world should be defined by who we stand with, not by who our corporations profit from.
“The objective and goal of this party must continue to be to achieve human dignity for all people, not just in this land
but in all others.”
—Rosemary Brown
Ending Corporate
Plunder Abroad
Today, 60 per cent of the world’s mining corporations are headquartered in Canada. Canadian mining corporations alone hold $352.6 billion in assets; roughly 68 per cent, or $240.6 billion, are held in foreign countries, and directly foreign-controlled mining enterprises own 31.9 per cent of Canada’s total mining and quarrying assets. What we have are Canadian corporations, far too often foreign owned or accountable to foreign shareholders, using Canada much like a tax haven, to exploit workers in foreign countries: of Canada’s total foreign mining assets, 20.2 per cent were from the U.S., and another 57.4 per cent were from middle to low-income countries, such as Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, as well as Panama, Zambia, Peru, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among others. And it's not just mining and quarrying: as of 2018, Canadian corporations held nearly $7 billion in energy assets in Colombia, and another $5.8 billion in Mexico. That's why Mission—Matsqui's New Democrats are fighting for an Extractive Profits Tax on the worldwide excess profits of Canadian-headquartered mining and fossil fuel corporations, with that revenue helping fund a Global South Debt Relief Fund to support debt cancellation and restructuring for countries facing unsustainable debt burdens. We're also fighting to end federal financial support for any overseas project that violates human rights or environmental standards, and to hold Canadian corporations legally accountable when they do.
Support For Palestinian Self-Determination And Ceasefire
Mission—Matsqui's New Democrats are calling for Canada to properly fund relief efforts in Palestine, including through UNRWA, to recognize anti-Palestinian racism within Canada's Anti-Racism Strategy, to support South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and for Parliament to officially recognize Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide and its administration of the West Bank as apartheid. We're also calling for the suspension of Canadian military cooperation with Israel, and an end to arms exports and preferential trade with a state committing grave violations of international law.
End Canada's Role
In The Arms Trade
For far too long, Canadian ports have handled freight we know to be carrying weapons, to be shipped out to regimes and governments we know to be abusing human rights. Although we may not press the bullets, it is our steel that they press, and it is our wood they cut their rifle handles from. It's time Canada stopped looking away from where our steel ends up: New Democrats are fighting for Canada to join the Arms Trade Treaty, parliamentary oversight of every arms export, a hard prohibition on selling weapons to any country with a real risk of human rights violations, and a federal manufacturing strategy that protects defence-sector workers as the industry changes.
Stop Trading In
Conflict Minerals
The same critical minerals Canada could be processing and manufacturing at home, the lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements powering the next economy, are, in other parts of the world, financing death and destruction. Canadian multi-national corporations are poisoning communities around the world in the scramble to extract critical minerals, and they’re using child labour and slave labour to do it: in 2026, the Transition Minerals Tracker recorded 329 allegations of human rights abuses, up from 156 in 2024, which brought the total from 2010 to 1,226 allegations across 229 mining operations. Of the 10 multi-national corporations with the most accusations of human rights abuses, a Canadian corporation, First Quantum Minerals (FQM), had the second highest number of abuses. New Democrats will fight to end the trade in conflict minerals, and make sure the critical minerals Canada does import are sourced transparently, not off the back of violence somewhere else in the world. No longer should Canadian corporations be trading minerals for blood.
Foreign Aid That
Actually Reaches People
Canada has made and broken promises on foreign aid for decades, falling well short of its international development commitments while increasingly funnelling what aid does go out through military and security channels instead of the people who actually need it. While Canadian corporations trade in conflict minerals and rake in billions doing it, while we sell the components to make deadly arms to the world’s single largest arms manufacturer, while we allow weapons to flow through our ports to governments and regimes accused of human rights abuses, while we create the conditions for a refugee crisis and turn them away when they flee the death and destruction we’ve caused, we fail to make life bearable for those living through the worst conditions, all because we refuse to sensibly tax the corporations responsible for it. That's why New Democrats are fighting for Canada to finally meet its development assistance obligations, and to stop the militarization of foreign aid, so international assistance goes toward fighting hunger, poverty, and disease, not toward propping up security operations.