Okanagan students are continuing to pressure the Royal Bank of Canada to vacate post-secondary institutes.
Students from the University of B.C. Okanagan and from Okanagan College protested the bank from March 6-8, alongside others across Canada.
UBC Okanagan students spent three days disrupting the RBC OnCampus branch, including handing out information fliers outside of the business. The goal is to push RBC to stop funding fossil fuel projects, among other things.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the student protest wrote, “RBC uses its on-campus presence to build trust with students, who they rely on for lifelong employees and future customers. Due to RBC’s deceitful marketing strategies, students are rarely given transparency around RBC’s unethical investments.”
Protests have also taken place at UBC Vancouver.
Students are asking RBC to:
- Immediately withdraw full financial support from the CGL and TMX pipelines, which do not have consent from Indigenous Peoples whose Territories they cross, respectively Wet’suwet’en Nation, Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Stó:lō Nation, Squamish Nation, and Stk’emlupsemc te Secwpemc Nation.
- Immediately divest from fossil fuel expansion projects and phase out support for all fossil fuel projects.
- Immediately commit to making no new/future investments in fossil fuel expansion, domestic and abroad.
- Immediately end full financial support for Palantir, which provides AI surveillance technology to Israeli security forces to criminalize Palestinians in the West Bank.
- Immediately leave both the UBC-V and UBC-O campuses.
READ MORE: UBC Okanagan students join in nationwide protest against RBC