People across Canada are taking on RBC.
This was meant to be a day for Canada’s biggest bank, RBC had their AGM where their super rich investors come together to celebrate their profits, rub themselves on the back, and high five each-other. But people across Canada threw a giant spanner in the works, and RBC were forced to move their entire AGM only less than 24 hours before the event ✊🏽
RBC are the fifth worst funder of fossil fuels in the world, and are funding giant pipelines like Coastal Gas Link – which steamrolls through indigenous land. But the steamroller has stopped, and that’s because leaders from the Wet’suwet’en are standing in front of it. And today shows how powerful the movement against Coastal Gas Link and RBC is.
Wet'suwet'en chiefs lead march to @RBC headquarters to confront Canada's largest fossil bank for their role in financing the rights violating @CoastalGasLink fracked gas pipeline
Joined by hundreds of supporters.#DefundClimateChaos #nomoredirtybanks pic.twitter.com/q7uYmrgoh0
— Richard Brooks ☀️ (@R_BrooksStand) April 7, 2022
Canadian activists, lead by indigenous chiefs, led an uprising across Canada. That means:
🔥 Hundreds of people in downtown Toronto on a week day marching on RBC’s head office demanding that they stop funding fossil fuels
🔥 Splashing headlines across national papers including the Globe, Reuters, and the FT (paywall)
🔥 Over 40 actions across the country of people marching, chanting and calling out RBC branches
🔥 Getting #RBCisKillingMe trending on Twitter
🔥 Celebrities including Mark Ruffalo, Leo DiCaprio, and Meryl Streep calling out an RBC owned bank (City National Bank) for their investments.
As a client of RBC & their subsidiary City National Bank, I am personally asking them to stop funding these Climate Bombs & the violence against First Nation land defenders their funding perpetuates. Action is desperately needed. Will you join me? https://t.co/BQ6EtxFUuY
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) December 30, 2021
And there’s plenty more!
This incredible work is showing RBC that they can’t continue to destroy indigenous communities. They can’t continue pouring money into the climate crisis. And they can’t keep pulling the wool over people’s eyes.
Whether it’s marches, paper headlines, social media attacks or shareholder resolutions, RBC are seeing that they’ve got a much bigger, more expensive problem on their hands – us. RBC MUST stop funding giant pipelines and fossil fuels immediately.
Sleydo, spokesperson for Gidimt’en Checkpoint of the Wet’suwet’en people said:
“By financing the Coastal GasLink pipeline, RBC is choosing to bypass our right to free, prior, and informed consent and instead justify police violence against unarmed Wet’suwet’en people to push the project through. As an Indigenous woman, I have experienced violence by militarized RCMP to forcibly remove me from my own territory, criminalize me, and jail me. RBC is willing to risk the killing of unarmed Wet’suwet’en people by police to push this project through sovereign lands.”
Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Co-Founder and Senior Director at Indigenous Climate Action said to shareholders at the AGM:
“I was incredibly alarmed to learn that the tar sands saw a 51% increase in funding to the tune of $30.7 Billion CAD in just two years since the start of the pandemic. The largest investment came from Canadian banks, namely RBC, who is the top financier of fossil fuels in Canada. These investments are not just numbers in a spreadsheet or dollars in a bank account – RBC is financing the destruction of our homelands by funding the tar sands and threatening the survival of all humans on this planet. These numbers are shocking to consider in light of the severity of the climate crisis; it is appalling that banks like RBC would double down on their investments to climate polluting industries when we need to see the exact opposite to adequately abate climate change.”
