A reflection on the Old Vic Occupation, the Board of Regents’ decision, and where we must go next
Chants of victory rang through the warm April evening as we marched up the Vic quad, hands holding signs about climate justice and hearts thumping with the exhilaration of long awaited triumph. Joyous hugs and delighted giggles punctuated the atmosphere outside Old Vic, where group selfies and plans for a pizza party were already underway. This was the moment we had all been waiting for, a momentous celebration of our collective power. This was the culmination of our boldest action ever, the result of years of advocacy, activism, and action. After eighteen uninterrupted days of occupying the Old Vic building as a part of the longest student occupation in University of Toronto’s 200-year-old history, we had succeeded; Victoria College had finally committed to divesting from fossil fuels.
Divestment refers to an institution’s decision to retract investments from a particular company or industry. Fossil fuel divestment not only withdraws financial support from the industry but also undermines the social capital that legitimizes its existence. Universities like UofT hold immense social, political, and intellectual influence. Thus, their commitment to divest signals to investors, politicians, and companies alike that supporting fossil fuels is no longer justifiable. Following a decade of relentless student activism, UofT committed to divestment in 2021. However, Trinity, St. Mikes, and Vic all manage their own endowment and, therefore, were not subject to this commitment. The largest of these endowments is that of Vic: nearly 250 million in pooled assets, with six to nine million CAD invested in fossil fuels.
The VUSAC Sustainability Commission joined forces with Climate Justice UofT to ramp up the fight for divestment throughout the last year. We conducted outreach, met with admin, disrupted a Board of Regents meeting, and co-organised two climate strikes. Following the March Vic Caucus, many hoped that a commitment would soon be announced. However, we needed one final show of student power to ensure victory was ours. We needed something unprecedented.
Planning for the Occupation began just two weeks before the action actually commenced; the effort it took to organize a disruption of this scale over such a short timespan can only be called herculean. Though the core organizing team was small, almost every active member of Climate Justice UofT was involved in the process. Trusted community members came together to lend us tents, sleeping bags, and essential supplies. We drafted documents, painted banners, ensured logistical necessities were met, and conducted meticulous risk assessments with legal experts, preparing ourselves for every possibility that might compromise the operational security of our actions or the safety of our participants. For two weeks, we strategized, we mobilized, and finally, we braced ourselves for what would be our boldest action yet.
Monday, March 27th, 10 AM: the gates of Old Vic flooded open as dozens of student organizers rushed inward, equipped with signs that called for Vic’s divestment and loudspeakers that chanted slogans of climate justice and student power. Over the next hour, the four walls inside Old Vic were draped with stark banners that read ‘ALL EYES ON VIC’ and ‘YOU ARE OUT OF TIME.’ Tables were stacked with signs that demanded futures over fossil fuels and stickers that artfully illustrated Vic as an institution drenched in oil. Instagram feeds and Twitter timelines were flooded with a bold declaration of our demands broadcasting to everyone a glimpse of what was to come. The Occupation of Old Vic had begun.
As Vic students, we had every right to do this: the Occupation violated neither city law nor the UofT Code of Conduct. However, that did not prevent Vic from attempting to find ways to kick us out or malign us in the public eye. Early on in the Occupation, they claimed that our equipment posed a fire hazard and that overnight occupancy of the building was in violation of safety regulations. They demanded that we take down our tents and vacate the building during nighttime hours, the latter of which would easily have allowed them to prevent us from re-entering the building come morning. However, the Toronto Fire Services visited the Occupation multiple times and never once communicated any need to move our equipment or vacate the premises. Despite Vic administration’s claims, our legal team informed us that we had no obligation to take down our tents or leave the building. If Vic administration wanted us to leave, they had to comply with our demands.
Additionally, President McEwen repeatedly emphasized the Board’s fiduciary responsibilities and its duty of care toward due procedure in her public statement, painting delayed divestment as a financially responsible stance. It’s not. There is strong evidence showing that fossil fuel divestment poses no financial risk. Sustainable investments are increasingly proving their financial reliability; fossil fuels, however, face significant legal, regulatory, and market risks in our era of climate collapse, making continued investment undesirable. Even in a capitalist system rigged toward its success, the fossil fuel industry has lost all its financial rationale. Let’s also not forget that Vic’s duty of care lies foremost toward its students and our futures; ‘due procedure’ is no justification for shirking this cardinal responsibility. In fact, we had diligently been following their so-called due procedure for ages with little results, all while watching the clock tick ever closer to a midnight of climate doom. Our emails had been ignored and our town-hall questions met with meaningless platitudes for years. Our requests for transparency from the Board seemed to be falling on deaf ears, our petitions and letters being met with nothing but loud silences. The fact of the matter was that we had tried asking nicely, only to realize it would never be enough. None of us had ever held any interest in sleeping on the cold hard floors of Old Vic for two weeks. Through its years of complicity and inaction, however, Vic had forced our hand. If Admin didn’t like that, they only had themselves to blame.
In contrast to Admin’s response, however, the outpour of support we received from the student community was overwhelming. The number of signatures on the Divest Vic petition rose by hundreds in a span of two weeks. Over a hundred unaffiliated students joined us over those eighteen days, many even staying overnight. Several others sent out emails to the Board, gave us their endorsements, and provided us with monetary and food donations that kept us all fed. The Occupation was sustained by the community, and it sustained a community in turn. The walls of occupied Old Vic held far more than just a protest. We had finals study sessions and read books together, engaged in academic discussions on food sovereignty, and hosted PEARS-led teach-ins on the intersections between sexual violence and environmental injustice. We held screenings to laugh at bad reality TV shows, hosted comically intense chess tournaments, and held impromptu guitar performances. We cozied up our tents with pillows and plushies and brightened the walls with posters and Pride flags. We broke bread together, making community meals a site of grief and joy alike: a place to bond over shared music tastes and vent about exams gone wrong, yet also a place to talk of generational trauma, to express anxieties and hope all in equal measure, to tell stories of nothing yet also everything. It was chaotic, it was beautiful, and it was powerful.
It was this forged community that empowered us to hold the longest occupation in the university’s history. It was this community that propelled it to success. Eighteen days after we’d launched a protest many had considered impossible to pull off a mere month ago, the Board of Regents finally relented. It had taken five years of organizing and the efforts of hundreds of students, but we had succeeded, if only partly: Victoria College committed to divesting from fossil fuels by 2030. They did not acknowledge our efforts in their announcement, of course, but we know this for what it is: a victory of student power and collective action.
Vic’s divestment commitment is a step in the right direction. However, 2030 is too late: Climate Justice UofT instead demands full and transparent divestment by 2025. The IPCC has made it clear that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 at the latest and halve by 2030 if we are to have any chance of limiting global warming to below 1.5°C. We cannot afford delays or half-measures, not when climate catastrophe is here to greet us right at our doorsteps. Just this summer, we’ve witnessed unprecedented fires blaze through Canada and the world, decimating Maui and displacing half the population of the North-Western Territories. We’ve seen deadly heat waves tear through Europe and the Middle East, with heat indices in the Persian Gulf soaring up to unfathomable highs of 66°C. We’ve seen record floods and landslides once again kill hundreds in South Asia. We’re set to breach the Paris Agreement’s limit of 1.5°C temperature rise within the next five years. July 2023 was the hottest month in human history. If you’re reading this a year from now, chances are you’ve already seen this record shatter twice over.
But our climate isn’t simply collapsing. It’s actively being destroyed at the altar of capitalism’s cancerous pursuit of profit. Oil executives have known the dangers of fossil fuel production for five decades now, but still have spent billions of dollars promoting disinformation and lobbying against effective climate action. Big Oil deliberately manufactured climate change denial among people and politicians alike, invented the personal carbon footprint to deflect responsibility onto individuals, and continues to use its influence to disrupt grassroots organizing and distort climate science. The planet is not simply dying: it’s falling victim to a first-degree murder. The fossil fuel industry is committing a crime against humanity and Vic has long remained complicit.
While Vic’s commitment to divest is absolutely a major victory, only the first of the Occupation’s three demands were met. Four months onward, there is little indication that Victoria College seeks to take steps toward transparency in the BoR, or push forward the timeline to 2025. And let’s not forget that Vic likely still owns an oil well in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Four months past its divestment commitment, the battle to break Big Oil’s chokehold on our college still rages on.
Yet, the fight for climate justice goes beyond fighting just the fossil fuel industry. We must instead take on every institution that serves to reinforce the capitalist and colonial extractive structures which continue to put oppressed communities across the world at far higher risk of environmental catastrophe. A fight for climate justice is a fight for affordable housing and food security for all. A fight for climate justice is a fight against policing and carcerality in all its forms. A fight for climate justice is a fight for Indigenous sovereignty on Turtle Island and beyond, for reproductive freedom and queer liberation, for labour rights and disability justice. A fight for climate justice is a fight to forge a better world for every single one of us.
The ceaseless barrage of climate disasters and increasing right-wing attacks on marginalized communities in recent years can make fighting for a better world seem like a doomed endeavour. However, hope is found everywhere we look. The WGA and SAG strikes have sparked a historic wave of labour mobilizations across North America. Youth in Montana recently won a game-changing lawsuit against fossil fuel extraction, while activists in Atlanta remain strong in the battle to protect the Weelaunee forest despite relentless police violence. Indigenous nations from Grassy Narrows to the Wet’suwet’en Yintah still stand unbowed despite centuries of genocidal oppression and continue to defend their homeland and our planet from the parasite of colonial extraction. And from Hawaii to the Mediterranean, people across the globe have stepped in to support those fleeing climate catastrophe, forging resilient networks of mutual aid in the stark absence of institutional support. Everywhere we look, we find people fighting back.
A better world is possible. The seeds of this transformation are already beginning to sprout at our feet. The responsibility to nurture their growth through hope, solidarity, and action is shared between all of us. The divestment movement illustrates that the power to change is possible when our communities come together to stand in unity behind a common cause. The Occupation was only made possible through bold, direct action, sustained community support, and resilient cross-movement solidarity. We must now seize this momentum and ramp up the pressure, not merely in our fight for a fossil-free UofT, but across all student movements alike. The time has come to build a diverse, radical, and resilient coalition of student advocacy capable of transforming everything for the better—and we need all hands on deck. This is an invitation, dear reader: we need you. Our future rests in palms that curl in power with every raised fist. The fight to transform it into something better has only just begun.
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The Strand reached out and received the following comment from Victoria University: “The work to begin divestment has begun as we move towards our 2030 goal. We have already developed a new, one-stop, and publicly accessible webpage that shares specific actions that we are taking to continuously improve our university’s sustainability—a commitment made in our current Strategic Framework. Divestment is a multi-stage process involving pooled funds that are independently managed by external investment managers who use their discretion to invest in companies from various sectors of the economy. Due to the nature of pooled funds and our current use of investment managers, it is not feasible to identify details such as institutional location and/or practices.
We will establish a communications plan in collaboration with the Board of Regents this fall regarding our divestment trajectory. Once it is complete, we will share it publicly to ensure that Vic U’s community members are informed of the steps that we are taking as we move forward. We also hope to update the community regarding the Weyburn Property that includes an oil well in the near future.”
