How we divested UQAM
or at least took all the credit
Organizing the Revolution
One day I was at UQAM with some other Divest McGill organizers answering questions about the history of Divest McGill. Once the interview ended, we asked what was happening at UQAM. The master’s student who was interviewing us sighed. Not much was happening at all, it seemed. I mentioned to him that I was studying at UQAM, for some reason. He seemed surprised, as I was the only anglophone there, but pleased. We agreed we’d meet later to see if we wanted to organize a divest movement at UQAM.
We sit down a few months later only to realize we had very different visions for the campaign. After intense discussion, we make a few dozen hard decisions, ending up with a huge plan: we’re going to reach out all the profs and environmental groups on campus, get funding, build our organizing team, a logo, a name, a website, a Facebook group. So, we had just finished this big meeting, and somehow it occurs to me to ask:
Me: Have you asked for a meeting with the endowment folks yet?
Other divester: Yes, but they never responded.
Me: Wanna go knock on their door?
Him: Sure, I’ve got about ten minutes.
Me: Me too.
The Meeting
We knock on the door. The secretary informs us that, turns out, the director of Fondation UQAM is in and has a few minutes free.
The guy welcomes us into his office.
Us: Did you get our email?
Director of Fondation UQAM: Yeah, sorry I never responded, but anyway, it’s too late.
Us: What do you mean?
He was grinning at us.
Director: We’ve already divested. We thought about it about a year ago and figured, “good idea.”
At Divest McGill, we had asked the university to agree to divest itself within the next five years. So we asked him what the timeline was like.
Director: We were waiting for a good opportunity. About a month later our investment managers called us:
‘How about right now?‘
We said, ‘Now’s good.’So they sold everything. We don’t have a cent in fossil fuels anymore.
Us: That’s amazing! Wait, have you told anybody?
Director: No.
Us: Would you please?
Director: Sure.
Us: … Great!
Our hard work was done.
As we’re leaving he tells us he used to be the minister of transportation and shows us some hilarious caricatures of him in the newspapers from his time as an MLA. The roads are bad in Quebec, so no big surprise that he had some exposure (being lambasted) in the media.
Media Firestorm?
We get out, delighted, until we started thinking about how this might play out in the media: Sun News, Alberta press, and all that. We had a lot of doubts. I think divestment is a great idea but it didn’t sound like the Fondation UQAM people had given it much thought. Their reasoning seemed to be that divesting sounded like a vaguely left-wing thing to do, so they should do it because they’re UQAM.
A few weeks later the researcher sends me a link to a Radio-Canada interview where the journalist is grilling this UQAM director like a steak: people still drive cars and how does UQAM dare throw Quebec’s natural gas sector under the bus? But to our surprise, the Fondation UQAM director was awesome. All that media experience defending Quebec’s roads must have paid off. He replied something to the effect of:
At UQAM we are very sensitive to the natural gas sector in Quebec. At the same time, we felt UQAM has to invest in building a carbon-neutral future starting right now. We want to invest in a green future.
He absolutely nailed it, which was a relief because this was on prime-time television.
Conclusion
So that is the long version of Divest UQAM’s short history — it was quite different from my experience at McGill. All we ever did was ask “did you tell anybody?” And then say please. Otherwise, the only thing Divest UQAM ever did was make extensive plans for nothing then scrap them.
Credit Where Credit is Due
A few weeks later, me and the other Divest UQAM guy, had a chance to give each other a high five.
After careful consideration of the available evidence, we were forced to conclude that Divest UQAM wouldn’t have succeeded without our combined years of experience and our brilliance. So, we humbly attributed all the credit for our wild success to ourselves.
Photo credit: Rohit Tandon from unsplash