The City of Victoria Invests in Palestine Genocide and Apartheid

Since the escalation of the conflict in Palestine in October 2023, public and private investments alike have come under close scrutiny as part of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) strategy by activists aiming to starve the genocidal Zionist regime of foreign funds. The University of Victoria was hit particularly hard, with an encampment on campus grounds that was meant to remain until the institution divested from war profiteers such as BlackRock.

In contrast, the City of Victoria escaped notice altogether. I’d been wondering for a while what our taxpayer dollars were funding, so I filed a Freedom Of Information (FOI) request for a comprehensive breakdown of its investment portfolio, which consists in large part of Municipal Financial Authority (MFA) funds. While these may look harmless at first glance, it turns out which funds actually matter because some are dirtier than others.

As I suspected, the City holds twelve million dollars of the MFA Money Market Fund, which is a regular market investment fund, and nearly fifteen million dollars’ worth of the MFA Ultra Short-term Bond Fund, which in financial terms means to maximise return on investment in the short term while keeping risk low, and consists primarily of government bonds mixed with bank shares. These are anything but ethical in scope, unlike the MFA Fossil Fuel Free Short-term Bond Fund for example. And while they still looks fairly innocuous, they do feature entries to make the Palestine-conscious activist bristle.

The former fund holds shares of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, which in turn holds shares of weapon manufacturer General Dynamics and donated to Zionist charities back in October 2023. TD was the primary target of protesters who blockaded the Victoria Pride Parade back in July.

Among the latter fund’s top ten holdings are the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Royal Bank of Canada. Both, especially the former, have been darlings of Palestine protesters repeatedly hitting their branches countrywide demanding they divest from weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems and the ominous surveillance company Palantir which spies on the Palestinian in the occupied territories.

Their combined weight is 15.24% of the ultra short-term fund’s worth, according to the latest publicly available benchmark figures. This means an investment of 2,280,962$, a significant portion of which is held in various dirty stocks, the above being only a short sample. As for the market fund, its share of TD comes down to 1.59%, amounting to 190,800$.

The City of Victoria might complain, just like the University of Victoria did, that divesting from these items would be complex, given the nature of investment funds. To the best of my knowledge however, the other MFA funds, such as the MFA Short-term Bond Fund, do not include shares of large banks; a swap would actually make divestment trivial. Given the diplomatic status between City Hall and me, I have not bothered with a request for comments prior to publishing this piece.

By the way, the MFA operates from an office at Uptown Mall in Victoria. Just saying.