Royal Bank of Canada responses on Palantir & Costal GasLink pathetic–unsigned, say nothing, from generic email

Royal Bank of Canada response regarding Palantir

Almost 6,000 letters have been sent to the Royal Bank of Canada over the last month.

Prior to this an email was sent to the Royal Bank of Canada by 20 organizations representing 30+ civil society groups. See the letter sent below, and the RBC response.

Read more about supporting organizations and campaign

Palantir provides their Artificial Intelligence (AI) predictive system to Israeli security forces, to identify people in occupied Palestine.

The Royal Bank of Canada has over 2 M shares valued at over $56 M USD in Palantir holdings. This relationship flies in the face of the recently offered option of a market-linked guaranteed investment certificate based upon environmental, social, and governance investigations which preclude investments in divisive and dangerous elements of society.

However, the Royal Bank of Canada’s UNSIGNED response from a generic email included that

With respect to the potential adverse human rights impacts arising from the application of
nascent technologies such as artificial intelligence, this is an emerging and important issue that
we consider as part of our E&S risk management process and which we continue to monitor

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The response

Simliarly, the RBC sent a unsigned response from a generic email to Gidimt’en Checkpoint leadership

The Gidimt’en Checkpoint from the Wet’suwet’en Members

On October 19th 2021 The Gidimt’en Checkpoint from the Wet’suwet’en Members issued a letter to over 35 Coastal GasLink (CGL) investors and banks in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. The letter demands investors and banks  — including JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, RBC, Scotiabank, BMO, Royal Dutch Shell, and CaixaBank  — cease and withdraw all support from Coastal GasLink and LNG Canada and highlights how financing the project violates Indigenous rights and breaks any investor commitments to racial justice, reconciliation, and social responsibility. 

RBC sent this response letter on November 8th 2021 back to Gidimt’en Checkpoint leadership. The email response was sent from a basic company email address and was unsigned by RBC leadership. 

In their email response they claim “RBC highly values the relationships we have with Indigenous Communities and the unique social,  cultural and historic contributions that Indigenous peoples have made in Canada.”   We know this to be false and if they really valued these relationships they would not be funding a destructive project that violates Indigenous sovereignty and ravages sacred headwaters through Wet’suwet’en territory.

In their letter they also claim “As stated in our Human Rights Position Statement, we respect the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination in accordance with international and domestic law.” Recent violence perpetrated on land defenders at the hands of RCMP further demonstrates that RBC does not actually practice what they claim are core values. Help us call out RBC for continuing to perpetuate colonial violence and oppression on Wet’suwet’en people, who have never ceded their right to exclusively use and occupy their territories, they are complicit in this violence by financing Coastal GasLink and TC Energy.

“Reconciliation isn’t financing a project that’s destroying our land, without our consent. Coastal GasLink has not engaged in respectful consultation with us. Backing this project implicates investors in perpetuating violence to our land and on my people,” says Molly Wickham, Gidimt’en, Wet’suwet’en Nation, Hereditary name Sleydo’. “If investors are serious about their commitments to social responsibility and racial justice, they must commit to not financing projects that threaten Wet’suwet’en sovereignty, violate our land and sacrifice our future. Otherwise, when companies talk of reconciliation, it’s just empty promises — and we’ve had more than enough of those already.”

The action that we are currently asking partners to take is amplifying the response letter and targeting RBC