Today’s Canadians blast RBS over tar sands

Since its public bail-out in 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland has raised more than £5.6 billion for companies involved in controversial Canadian tar sands projects, and Canada’s First Nations sent representatives to the RBS AGM in Edinburgh last month to insist that the bank must cease financing tar sands companies.

Many First Nations communities are fighting the extensive tar sands as well as the proposed 1,170 kilometre long Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the British Columbian coast, which will pass through the territories of 80 First Nations, all of whom are opposed to it.

The tar sands extraction projects on tribal lands in Alberta, have been described as the most destructive industrial project on the planet. An area larger than England is being excavated by the industry. The Athabasca river delta, once a pristine boreal forest with clean rivers and lakes, has become a devastated ecosystem of deforestation, open pit mines and toxic ‘tailings’ ponds. Fish in nearby waters regularlyexhibit tumours and birds landing on contaminated tailings ponds die. In neighbouring First Nations communities, where local people have hunted and fished for many years, abnormally high rates of cancer and immune system diseases are now being found.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, from Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, representing the Indigenous Environmental Network, said: “Banks in Canada and in the US have been put on notice for their dirty finance of the Canadian tar sands which is resulting in the destruction of First Nations Peoples’ way of life. The UK’s RBS, being a majority publicly-owned bank, should be under the greatest scrutiny for its involvement.”