Time for Dalhousie to divest from fossil fuels, student protestors say

Local Journalism Initiative
·2 min read

A group of Dalhousie students has a message for their university’s administration: Get out of oil.

On Wednesday afternoon, members of DalZero—a newly-formed group of sustainability, political science and international development students—marched from the Student Union Building to president Kim Brooks’s office, calling on Dalhousie to sell off the $30.2 million in endowment funds currently invested in the fossil fuel industry.

DalZero’s members are demanding the university divest fully from fossil fuels by 2040—a step that campaign coordinator Caitlin Lawrence says other Canadian universities have already taken.

“The University of Laval is already carbon neutral, and they've fully divested from the Carbon Underground [a list of publicly-traded companies with the largest coal, oil and gas reserves],” Lawrence says, speaking with The Coast. “So we do know that it’s possible to divest from fossil fuels.”

University and college campuses across Canada have seen a rise in calls for similar divestments in recent years, including at Acadia University and St. Francis Xavier University. Dal has mulled divestment as far back as 2014, when—despite the advocacy efforts of Divest Dal—administrators decided, “considering all the impacts,” they ultimately didn’t “feel that pursuing divestment is the right approach for the university.”

Ten years later, the university tells The Coast it’s ready to meet with students “to chat about the university’s carbon reduction efforts as well as the university’s student wellbeing efforts.” But Dalhousie stopped short of mentioning divestment in its statement offered to The Coast.

Lawrence believes it’s time for change.

“We don't want any more money being slicked with oil—because it’s 2024,” she tells The Coast. “It’s undeniable we're in a climate catastrophe. If you look at Nova Scotia over the past summer, we had record-breaking fires, floods, and an increasing number of powerful storms and hurricanes.”

Lauren Phillips, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Coast

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