By Alana Power
Climate justice is high on the list of priorities for Toban Black.
Black heads up the group Mobilization for Climate Justice at the University of Western Ontario. He is working on his PhD in sociology, but that doesn’t stop him from being an environmental activist.
His group serves as advocates for the people who are harmed by climate problems.
“We look at who is more responsible for climate problems and who is harmed by climate problems and how that responsibility and that harm falls along the lines of injustices like racism and class inequalities,” he said.
However some people say that the justice issues are not really open to his group’s point of view.
“They’ll say it’s just about emissions targets… they have a more narrow approach to climate issues,” he said.
Black’s group formed this summer, and has made the tar sands their main objective thus far.
They are protesting the involvement of the Royal Bank of Canada, who are the leading financier of the tar sands, he said.
They are circulating a petition among Londoners and UWO students to collect signatures encouraging the university to cut ties with RBC because they believe they are unethical.
On November 30, members of mobilization for climate justice went to hand out leaflets on the tar sands at a branch of the RBC, located on the corner of Richmond and King Streets in London.
“We were giving them out to tellers and customers,” Black said. “We thought it was quite successful, we made our presence felt at the bank.”
Only three people were there leafleting, but they did catch the attention of one police officer.
“The police officer told us we had to leave the bank. He said you’re not allowed to do it (leafleting) in here, you’re allowed to do it outside,” said Steve D’Arcy, a member of the climate justice group.
D’Arcy believes that they caught the attention of the police officer because they were taking pictures of the building.
“What we thought happened was he took us to be terrorists or something,” he said. “He said nowadays when people are taking pictures of buildings we have to look into it.”
Black said that the police officer didn’t realize that they were actually just taking a photograph of a sign they had placed in RBC’s window.
The response of the employees at the bank was varied, Black said.
“There were managers hovering in the background,” he said. “One of them had a smirk on his face like he thought we were silly.”
The group has collected signatures on their tar sands petition, but are not quite ready to act. “We are waiting for more signatures before we approach RBC further,” Black said.
Their online petition has not been as successful as the physical petition that they have been circulating among students and Londoners. However, they still believe that the online petition is important.
“Although it’s about Western, the approach we’re taking is that it’s a global issue,” Black said.
At the meeting of the climate justice group on Monday night, group member Shirley Barr was encouraging the other group members to circulate their group’s message about climate justice to the rest of their communities.
“We need some attention to the issue locally and then maybe nationally,” she said.
They had initially planned to gather attention by holding a die-in at the RBC branch, D’Arcy said. They planned to go to the bank and stage mock-deaths to emphasize their view that the tar sands have negative effects on human health. However, they could not get enough people to commit.
There is always the risk of arrest when staging a protest, said D’Arcy. He said that even before the leafleting action at RBC they discussed among themselves the risk of arrest and decided to avoid being arrested at all costs.
“We took it for granted that we were going to be there very briefly,” he said.
While they were few in number and were kicked out of the branch, the group feels that they may have made their cause known to some of the employees.
“I think as employees of RBC many of them are not in sync with the organization,” said Teresa Ruttan at the meeting on Monday.
The group leafleted at the RBC branch again on Tuesday. They hope that slowly but surely they will educate London’s citizens about their cause.