Peter munk & the Munk School of Global Affairs

Among 35 million Canadians, the University of Toronto would be hard pressed to find a less credible source of support for the study of international affairs than Peter Munk. Munk (now deceased) was a right-wing ideologue and mining magnate with an important personal stake in a particular foreign policy. Munk founded Barrick Gold has benefited from Canadian diplomatic support, export financing, and development aid.

With Barrick Gold’s projects spurring ecological devastation, communal conflict, and dozens of deaths on six continents, the Toronto company led the charge against moves to withhold diplomatic and financial support to Canadian companies found responsible for significant abuses abroad. Bill C-300 (An Act Respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas Corporations in Developing Countries) was introduced in 2009 with aims to “promote environmental best practices and to ensure the protection and promotion of international human rights standards in respect of the mining, oil or gas activities of Canadian corporations in developing countries.” The Bill was narrowly defeated in 2010, owing to Members of Parliament who sided with Canada’s massive mining industry lobby and voted against it. Following the Bill’s defeat, Munk wrote a letter in the Toronto Star stating that those ‘courageous’ MPs should be celebrated — for had the bill passed, “the mining industry of Canada … would have been driven out of our country” and the mines would have fallen into the hands of foreign operators with “lower CSR standards.”

Munk also espoused far-right political views, and a disregard for human, women, and Indigenous rights. In 1997, he praised dictator Augusto Pinochet for “transforming Chile from a wealth-destroying socialist state to a capital-friendly model that is being copied around the world.” In 1999, the Canadian Jewish News reported on a donation Munk made to an Israeli university and a speech in which he “suggested that Israel’s survival is dependent on maintaining its technological superiority over the Arabs.” In a 2007 op-ed to the Financial Times, he compared Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to Hitler. In 2011, a Human Rights Watch investigation found that members of Barrick’s security force in Papua New Guinea were implicated gang raping many local women. When asked about this issue by the Globe and Mail, Munk dismissively responded that “gang rape is a cultural habit” in countries like Papua New Guinea. During a 2014 Economist interview, when the topic of Indigenous groups having “more say and power in resource development these days,” he responded that “Globally it’s a real problem. It’s a major, major problem.”

In 1997, Munk and the University of Toronto agreed upon a $6.4 million contract to rename the University’s International Studies Department as ‘the Munk Centre for International Studies.’ More importantly, the contract stipulated that the Centre would receive advice from Barrick’s international advisory board, which included former US President George H. Bush and former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (when asked why he appointed Mulroney to Barrick’s board, Munk told Peter C. Newman: “He has great contacts. He knows every dictator in the world on a first name basis”) and it empowered Munk to stop payments if dissatisfied with the Centre’s development and teaching. Satisfied with the Centre’s direction, Munk would donate $5 million in 2006, and $35 million in 2010 renaming it to today’s ‘Munk School of Global Affairs.’ The latter deal committed the University of Toronto to paying $39 million from its endowment, while the Ontario and federal governments chipped in $50 million (as well as a $16 million tax credit to Peter Munk for his $35 million donation).

Flush with resources, the Munk School of Global Affairs is highly influential. It co-sponsors an award for the world’s best non-fiction book on foreign affairs, Canadian Forces College workshops, an annual lecture with Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy, and the Toronto International Film Festival speakers series. The School also co-sponsors the Munk Debates, which held the first-ever Canadian foreign policy leaders debate during the 2015 federal election.

The School’s Munk Fellowship in Global Journalism awards twenty fellowships for a year-long program run in partnership with the Globe and Mail, CBC News, Toronto Star, Postmedia and Thomson Reuters. The School has significant ties to the Globe and Mail with former editors-in-chief John Stackhouse and William Thorsell both senior fellows at the School.

While executive director at the Munk Centre in 2007, Marketa Evans helped spawn the Devonshire Initiative, a project for NGOs and mining companies to discuss corporate social responsibility and development issues. Named after the street where the School is located, the Devonshire Initiative undermined a government–civil society Roundtable that called for withholding government financial and political support to resource companies found responsible for major abuses abroad. Evans would later be appointed Canada’s inaugural Corporate Social Responsibility counselor, a post the Harper Conservatives set up to alleviate pressure to restrict government support for companies found responsible for international abuses.

The School supported the Harper Conservatives’ low-level war against Iran. After severing diplomatic ties and designating Iran a state sponsor of terrorism in 2012, the Department of Foreign Affairs (today, Global Affairs Canada) gave $250,000 to the Munk School’s Global Dialogue on the Future of Iran. The aim of the Dialogue was to foment opposition to the regime and help connect dissidents inside and outside Iran. Expanding the Global Dialogue on the Future of Iran, the Department of Foreign Affairs gave the Munk School another $9 million in 2015 to establish the Digital Public Square project to undermine online censorship within enemy states.

Canada’s most influential global studies program is the brainchild of a mining magnate with a significant personal stake in a particular foreign policy, and the School has been shaped in his hard right image.