About 60 American celebrities have joined a petition to demand that the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) end its financing of the Coastal GasLink gas pipeline project in northern British Columbia.
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Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr are among the many personalities who have signed the “No More Dirty Banks” petition.
These celebrities have targeted RBC since it is the parent company of City National Bank, considered to be the “bank of the stars”.
“Right now, big banks like the Royal Bank of Canada are funding a fractured gas pipeline, which is bulldozing through Wet’suwet’en Nation lands in northern British Columbia, Canada,” he said. Mark Ruffalo in a video shared on the petition’s homepage.
“For the past three years and as recently as November, the RCMP have violently arrested and detained non-violent indigenous land defenders and journalists,” the actor also said.
According to the interpreter of Hulk, the bank would finance the project to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and would be the pivot of a loan supported by several banks. “While RBC is committed to respecting Indigenous human rights, it continues to fund Coastal GasLink’s violence against Wet’suwet’en people.”
“Our sacred source, the Wedzin Kwa River, is the lifeline of our people. By funding Coastal GasLink, CNB’s parent company, RBC, puts us in grave danger,” Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokeswoman Molly Wickham said in a statement on Wednesday.
A demonstration is also scheduled for Friday in Los Angeles and April 7 elsewhere in North America to protest against the involvement of the RBC in the project.