So I really like the Winter Olympics – they really put the Summer Olympics to shame. Hockey, luge, figure skating, bobsledding, downhill skiing… and even that sport that combines cross-country skiing and target shooting! (Whose idea was that??)

But this year, a wide variety of activists, in B.C. and beyond, are reminding us that the 2010 Vancouver Olympics aren’t all fun and games. In fact, they’re resulting in huge developments on unceded First Nations land, massive spending on hyper-militarized security, and displacement of poor people and increased homelessness in Vancouver.

And, of course, it’s an opportunity for some good ol’-fashioned corporate PR. Companies from around the world with gruesome environmental and human rights track records – like Dow, Coca-Cola, and General Electric – are lining up to spend millions on funding the Olympics and sprucing up their tarnished images.

And the lead sponsor of the Olympic torch run: Royal Bank of Canada, the ATM for the Alberta tar sands. In fact, their website for the torch run calls on people across Canada to “make a pledge” to “make a better Canada,” and touts RBC’s “Blue Water Pledge” to “support watershed protection” – a little bit hypocritical, given that RBC has pledged $3.8 billion in financing to tar sands companies in the last six months alone.

So a group of folks in Vancouver decided to call RBC on their greenwashing. They issued a callout last week – endorsed by RAN - calling for protests at RBC branches across Canada every Friday at noon, to protest RBC’s attempts to use their Olympic funding to greenwash their role as the world’s biggest financier of the tar sands.

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October 12-18 is World Rainforest Week. Every year, we take this opportunity to highlight rainforest destruction around the world – and what we are doing to stop it. And RAN is indeed doing great work to stop rainforest destruction for palm oil in Indonesia (in fact, we just put out a really cool report that talks about the link between agrofuels and rainforest destruction).

But I’d like to use this year’s World Rainforest Week to talk about a little-known threat that tar sands development poses to temperate (i.e. cold, not hot & sweaty) rainforests in British Columbia.

The areas marked in green are existing mature rainforest; the areas marked in red have been deforested.

“Rainforests – in British Columbia??” you might say. (Well, actually, if you’re savvy enough to be reading this blog, then you may well know that rainforests don’t just exist in the tropics.) That’s right: BC is home to the Great Bear Rainforest, an area of spectacular natural beauty and biodiversity, home to many species – like the “spirit” bear – that exist nowhere else in the world.

But this spectacular rainforest is facing an urgent threat: the proposed construction of an oil pipeline that would run from the tar sands of Alberta to Kitimat, a town at the end of a long, narrow sea inlet that passes through some of the most spectacular parts of the Great Bear Rainforest.

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RBC CEO Gord Nixon should be putting his bank’s money where his mouth is. Last week, he offered an incoherent defense of RBC’s “balanced approach” to the environment after RAN activists confronted him on the bank’s financial support for expansion of Canada’s tar sands.

Recognizing his stumble, Nelson hit the papers this week to explain. “You can’t over-emphasize the environment at huge cost to the economy” Nixon told the National Post, “and at the same time you cannot do things economically that are a huge cost to the environment.”

Below the surface, though, RBC’s “balanced approach” is anything but. More »

Rainforest Action Network drops Seventy-Foot Banner Over Niagara Falls to Welcome Prime Minister Harper to the U.S.
Banner: “Canadian Tar Sands Oil Undermines North America’s Clean Energy Future”
See more photos here.

Before dawn this morning, a small team of climate activists rappelled from the US observation deck at Niagara Falls. Dangling hundreds of feet above the ground, they sent a special welcome message to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper ahead of his first official visit to the White House to push dirty Tar Sands oil.

Not that he’s feeling so welcome anyway. Obama limited the meeting to just one hour. While some have called it a slap in the face, Aides say Harper will turn the other cheek. “The economy, and the clean-energy dialogue,” one aide told the Globe and Mail, “will dominate the discussions.” Obama needed to dodge controversy over oil imports from Canada’s tar sands in the midst of the Climate Legislation debate. Harper needed a story to go with his photo-op.

During Harper’s first official trip to meet Obama in the U.S., the two leaders are expected to discuss climate change and energy policy ahead of the upcoming G20 Summit. Canada supplies 19% of U.S. oil imports, more than half of which now comes from the tar sands, making the region the largest single source of U.S. oil imports. The expansion of the tar sands will strip mine an area the size of Florida. Complete with skyrocketing rates of cancer (by 400%!) for First Nations communities living downstream, broken treaties, toxic belching lakes so large you can see them from outer space, churning up ancient boreal forest, destroyed air and water quality, the tar sands have been called the most destructive project on Earth.

Tomorrow’s visit to the U.S. by Prime Minister Harper is the latest attempt by Canadian Federal and Provincial officials to lock in subsidies for 22 new and expanded refinery projects and oil pipelines crisscrossing 28 states, which would transport and process the dirty tar sands oil. Many are concerned that Prime Minister Harper wants to protect the tar sands oil industry from climate regulation, even though it is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

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Over the past decade, as oil prices have risen ever higher, oil companies have begun a massive – and massively destructive – project of tearing Canada’s boreal forest to pieces, in order to get at a layer of sand that contains 10% oil. To get the oil out, they need three barrels of natural gas for every barrel of oil produced. The process creates vast lakes of polluted water – which already cover 50 square miles – that are seeping into the groundwater and rivers, poisoning Indigenous communities; already, thousands of ducks have died after landing in these wastewater lakes. The wreckage from this horribly destructive process already covers 500 square miles – but the area earmarked for future destruction is the size of Florida. Protests of Indigenous peoples are being ignored. Politicians are redirecting money from clean energy projects to finance tar sands research. And all this is happening in our friendly neighbor to the north, Canada – and U.S. oil companies are raking in huge profits from tar sands oil, and are pumping the world’s dirtiest oil from Alberta straight to your gas tank.

Sounds like a pretty important news story, right?

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In Toronto today, RAN appealed directly to Janet Nixon – the wife of Royal Bank of Canada’s CEO, Gordon Nixon – to help us end her husband’s company’s massive bankrolling of the Alberta tar sands.

During rush-hour commute this morning, two Indigenous Canadian women – RAN’s own Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, and Heather Milton-Lightening – scaled flagpoles in front of the main entrance of Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC’s) headquarters in Toronto, dropping a banner reading “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon.com”. On the streets below, they were joined by dozens of Toronto RAN supporters, spreading the same message to every RBC employee they could talk to: an appeal to Mrs. Janet Nixon, the wife of RBC CEO Gordon Nixon, to lend her strong and influential voice to those fighting to protect Canada’s clean water and respect Indigenous rights by pushing RBC to phase out its investments in Alberta tar sands projects. They handed out flyers, held banners, and even circled the building on bikes with “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon.com” flags.

And at the same time as the banner was being unfurled, RAN supporters and allies began emailing a video to key RBC executives – in which RAN’s Michael Brune appeals to Mrs. Nixon to help RBC regain its environmental leadership by withdrawing its funding for the tar sands. Over 3,000 people sent over 12,000 emails to these top RBC execs. (If you haven’t participated in this online action yet, it’s not too late! Click here to view the video and email it to RBC executives.)

You can also view the video on YouTube (be sure to go to PleaseHelpUsMrsNixon.com and take action when you’re done watching):

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UPDATE: RBC CEO Gordon Nixon is outside at the rally watching the RAN activists who deployed the banner!

More to come, but take a look at www.pleasehelpusmrsnixon.com.

Members of the Toronto RAN chapter have just deployed a banner outside RBC headquarters directing people to the site:

The site has a video of RAN’s executive director Michael Brune appealing directly to the wife of RBC CEO Gordon Nixon asking her to help get RBC to stop financing tar sand oil expansion.

The Toronto RAN chapter has been flooding downtown Toronto with posters bearing the phrase “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon” and a quick google search reveals that people have been hard at work trying to figure them out.

Mystery solved I suppose.

Check out the final glorious episode of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere

In this one we talk to bands, Chrissy Swain from Grassy Narrows, RAN activists, and talk about how YOU can get involved with the campaign

Check out episode 9 of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere

Check out episode 7 of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere