Canada Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act (Bill S-211)

Mechanism

Bill S-211 creates Canada's first horizontal statutory framework addressing forced and child labour in global supply chains. The Act operates on two parallel vectors:

1. Annual supply-chain disclosure mandate In-scope entities must file a report to the Minister of Public Safety by 31 May each year covering their previous financial year. Reports must address:

• Organisational structure and supply-chain scope
• Policies and due-diligence processes on forced/child labour
• Identified risks and mitigation measures
• Remediation measures taken
• Training provided to employees
• Assessment of the effectiveness of the entity's measures

All reports must be approved by the entity's board of directors (or equivalent governing body), posted prominently on the entity's public website, and submitted to Public Safety Canada's online catalogue. Jointly with applicable subsidiaries, each entity in a corporate group that meets thresholds must file independently.

Threshold test (any two of three):

• CAD ≥20m in assets
• CAD ≥40m in revenue
• ≥250 employees (averaged over two most recent financial years)

Estimated 5,000+ Canadian-listed and Canada-operating entities are in scope.

2. Customs Tariff amendment — Schedule 9898.00.00 extended to child labour Prior to S-211, Canada's Customs Tariff already prohibited imports of goods produced with forced labour (Section 202, Schedule 9898.00.00, enacted 1997). S-211 amends Schedule 9898.00.00 to extend the prohibition to goods produced with child labour. CBSA enforces the prohibition at the border. This makes Canada one of a small G7 group with statutory child-labour import bans alongside the US (19 U.S.C. § 1307, extended to Xinjiang by UFLPA).

G7 forced-labour architecture context

Canada's Act is the third pillar of the converging G7 forced-labour supply-chain control architecture:

• US UFLPA (Pub. L. 117-78, Dec 2021) — Xinjiang-focused rebuttable presumption model;

goods wholly/in-part from XUAR or from FLETF-listed entities presumed to violate 19 U.S.C. § 1307 absent clear-and-convincing evidence to CBP.

• EU Forced Labour Regulation (Reg 2024/3015, EIF Nov 2024, full application 2027) —

global horizontal market-prohibition + export ban; Commission-led investigations; Art 7 high-risk database mechanism.

• Canada S-211 (S.C. 2023, c. 9, EIF Jan 2024) — disclosure mandate + customs-tariff

extension. The weakest enforcement vector of the three (no rebuttable presumption, no Commission investigation power), but fills the disclosure gap and adds the child-labour import prohibition.

The three instruments create overlapping compliance requirements for multinationals with North American and EU market access, driving convergence toward global supply-chain due-diligence standards.

Downstream implications

• Any entity with Canadian revenues/assets/employees meeting two of three thresholds must

file by 31 May annually — the 2024 deadline (for FY2023) was the first; compliance rates were mixed in year one.

• Board sign-off requirement raises personal director liability.
• Sector exposure: apparel/textile, electronics (cobalt, rare earths), agri-commodities

(cocoa, palm oil), and critical-minerals sourcing (DRC cobalt, cotton) are highest-risk.

• CBSA border enforcement of the Schedule 9898.00.00 child-labour prohibition is materially

weaker than US CBP Withhold Release Orders (WROs) — no equivalent rebuttable presumption mechanism. Importers face the prohibition but CBSA capacity to operationalise at scale remains unclear.

Open questions

• Will Canada strengthen S-211 toward a rebuttable-presumption model closer to UFLPA (mooted

in 2025 parliamentary reviews)?

• CBSA enforcement practice on child-labour import prohibition — no public WRO-equivalent

database to date.

• Year-two (FY2024) compliance rates and quality of disclosed due-diligence programmes.