RBC felt the heat at its 2024 shareholder meeting

Photo credit: Joshua Best

Last week was the Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC) annual shareholder meeting.

Dozens of Indigenous and Black land and water defenders entered the meeting, and shared testimony of the harms caused by RBC’s fossil fuel financing.

How did RBC respond? By censuring and silencing them.

Last year, RBC segregated Indigenous and Black delegates to a separate room and assaulted Indigenous matriarchs and Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs. This year, powerful land defenders like Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chief Na’Moks, Tara Houska from Giniw Collective, and Sharon Lavigne with Rise St. James took over the meeting.

Leaders looked RBC CEO Dave McKay in the eye while questioning everything from the bank’s investments in projects like Coastal GasLink to the excessive pay-bumps to its executives for profiting from Indigenous land theft and environmental racism.

Hundreds rallied in the rain in Toronto in solidarity with land defenders with clear demands: RBC must end fossil fuel financing and stop violating human rights.

We marched around the Toronto Congress Centre where shareholders gathered, and were met by a heavy police and private security presence.

One thing is for certain, we put RBC on its proverbial back foot. It’s clear that RBC has to resort to dirty tricks during its biggest propaganda moment of the year because the bank and its executives are scared of this movement. 

That’s not all, just before the AGM, RBC agreed to the demands of two shareholder proposals introduced by the New York City Comptroller and the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs. These resolutions include expanding RBC’s Environmental and Social Risk process to evaluate projects that would cross Indigenous lands, and to regularly disclose its ratio of clean energy supply financing to dirty fossil fuel financing..

This is huge. Three years ago, having Canada’s largest bank concede to these demands would have been unthinkable. But thanks to the power of this movement and frontline land defenders, RBC is starting to cave. 

But we’ve got a lot more work to do to get RBC to divest from fossil fuels entirely, and respect Indigenous rights. Fighting back against Big Oil and big banks can seem like a daunting task. But RBC’s behaviour at this year’s shareholder meeting proves that our pressure is working! We know this fight won’t be easy, but by working in partnership with frontline communities, we can win.

Together, the many will defeat dirty money.