How Ethical are Canada’s Ethical Funds?“Conscientious” investments and the tar sands connection http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/3891

Last spring, the US-based environmental group Rainforest Action Network (RAN), found that tar sands investment by Canadian banks totaled almost $50 billion. In a letter to RAN, RBC confirmed it was “a financier of oil sands activity, although, at almost $17 billion not currently the largest.”There is no doubt that the impacts of tar sands extraction are enormous. People living downstream of the tar sands, in the community of Fort Chipewyan, have been reporting elevated rates of cancer and other illnesses and blaming it on pollution from the tar sands. Details of their ailments have been widely documented, including in a recent special production of CBC's The Nature of Things.