“No Fracking, No Fossil Fuels!”
Divest Mcgill Protests CAMSR Meeting
On Monday October 22, Divest Mcgill staged a protest in front of the James administration building from 1 to 2 PM (see live and short video on our Facebook page). The protest happened while the Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR) held a meeting inside. CAMSR is an ethics board that reports to the Board of Governors, the highest authority at Mcgill. Principal Suzanne Fortier sits on the board.
Divest Mcgill is pressuring CAMSR to reconsider its statement that the fossil fuels industry’s activities do not cause “grave social injury,” following a report from the Un-backed Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). CAMSR defines grave social injury as “the grave injurious impact which the activities of a legal person is found to have on consumers, employees, or other persons, or on the natural environment [that] violate, or frustrate the enforcement of rules of domestic or international law intended to protect individuals against deprivation of health, safety, or basic freedoms, or to protect the natural environment.” The IPCC recently concluded that a 1.5°C rise in global temperature could result in extreme increases in dryness, water scarcity, and mass extinction of coral reefs. The report also predicted that this threshold will be crossed sometime between 2030 and 2052. In spring 2013 and again in March 2016, the Board of Governors voted against divestment from fossil fuels. These votes followed reports from CAMSR claiming that there was no compelling evidence that the fossil fuels industry’s activities cause “grave social injury.”
In a message to The Mcgill Daily, a representative of Divest Mcgill stated “we keep rallying [and/or] protesting outside of CAMSR’S meetings because they are the ones that can recommend divestment to the Board. While we know that they can hear us, we want them to listen and recognize that they are the only [organization] critical of divestment.”
Divestment from fossil fuel has the longstanding support of the Students’ Society of Mcgill University (SSMU), the PostGraduate Students’ Society (PGSS), the Mcgill Association of University Teachers (MAUT), the
Chalk marks left by Divest Mcgill
faculties of Arts and Law, and the Mcgill School of Environment. On September 13 2018, Divest Mcgill received support from the Senate, who motioned the Principal through the Board of Governors “to divest the endowment from all companies whose primary business is the extraction, distribution, and/or sale of fossil fuels; and from all mutual funds that invest in such companies.”