Canada’s FIPA with the UAE deepens ties to forced labour, extreme-heat risks and fossil-fuel expansion, undermining human rights and climate commitments while legitimizing an autocratic system that harms migrant workers and the environment. (Photo: Nancy Pauwels via iStock)
On November 20, Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a “foreign investment promotion and protection agreement” (FIPA) with the United Arab Emirates. This is deeply troubling — and legally indefensible. Such an agreement is incompatible with Canada’s domestic and international human rights and climate obligations.
The UAE is dependent on polluting climate-altering fossil fuels and has a governance system that shields capital from accountability, creating systemic environmental exploitation. Its economic model is rooted in aggressive oil and gas extraction and carbon-intensive megaprojects. These sectors are the backbone of the UAE’s wealth and political power.
Migrant workers, overwhelmingly from South and Southeast Asia, bear the environmental burden of this development model through chronic heat stress, exposure to unsafe worksites and the ecological degradation that underpins rapid construction and dirty energy expansion.
Human Rights Watch has documented that outdoor workers are routinely subjected to extreme heat without adequate protections, even as climate change amplifies dangerous temperature and humidity levels. The UAE’s primary regulatory instrument, a limited “midday work ban,” fails to account for cumulative heat exposure or the lethal interaction of heat and humidity. Evidence shows increased risks of kidney injury, chronic dehydration and heat-stroke fatalities among migrant workers. Canadian investor protections that deepen capital flows into carbon-intensive sectors make Canada complicit in these harms under international environmental and human rights law.
According to Human Rights Watch and numerous UN special rapporteurs, the UAE’s labour regime facilitates forced labour conditions: wage theft, illegal recruitment fees, passport confiscation, severe constraints on job mobility and the persistent shadow of the kafala system, which binds migrant workers to a specific employer while they’re in the country. Employers can file retaliatory “absconding” charges that criminalize workers fleeing abuse. Independent trade unions and collective bargaining are prohibited, effectively eliminating any way for workers to challenge unsafe workplace conditions or environmental harms.
For domestic workers, overwhelmingly women, the situation is even more dire: confinement, physical and sexual abuse, unpaid labour and exclusion from key labour protections. These represent structural gaps that the state has chosen not to remedy.
Canada can’t ignore these realities. Under International Labour Organization conventions on forced labour, customary human rights obligations and emerging norms related to climate-related occupational harm, states must avoid entering economic arrangements that support or benefit from rights violations. A FIPA, by design, protects investors and limits the host state’s regulatory space — the opposite of what is required to safeguard migrant workers or reduce environmental risks.
Rather than enabling stronger enforcement of labour or environmental standards, a FIPA shields Canadian capital from future regulatory tightening in the UAE, undermining Canada’s duty to ensure due diligence across transnational supply chains.
Reform in the UAE is unlikely. The country is a federation of monarchies where democratic participation is virtually nonexistent. Civil society is heavily restricted, independent labour organizing is banned and dissent, including environmental advocacy, is met with surveillance, repression and incarceration under vague national security laws. The absence of democratic accountability is core to maintaining regressive labour and environmental standards. Entering an investment agreement with such a state rewards autocracy and grants international legitimacy to practices Canada claims to oppose.
Shifting from one problematic partner — the United States — toward a petro-autocracy is not progress; it is regression camouflaged as diversification.
From a geopolitical standpoint, shifting from one problematic partner — the United States — toward a petro-autocracy is not progress; it is regression camouflaged as diversification. The UAE’s model is not aligned with climate stabilization, human-rights protection or equitable development. A FIPA reinforces Canada’s integration into carbon-intensive, rights-eroding global value chains.
In short, entering into a FIPA with the UAE exposes Canada to serious reputational, legal and moral risk. It binds Canada to a regime that treats migrant workers as expendable, relies on fossil-fuel expansion as its core economic engine and suppresses the civil society actors needed to enforce environmental and labour rights. Canada should not legitimize this model — let alone protect Canadian investors operating within it — without enforceable, binding conditions requiring fundamental reforms, including full labour protections, freedom of association, safe-work standards for extreme heat, domestic-worker protections and genuine environmental safeguards.
If the federal government is serious about human rights, environmental justice and climate leadership, it must ensure that any agreement does not entrench exploitation. Anything less is not partnership. It is complicity in global human and environmental exploitation.
