Arms Embargo Forest City and Museum London clash over TD Funding

According to anti-war coalition group Just Peace Advocates, TD bank has invested ten billion dollars in war crimes and genocide through financial ties with weapons manufacturers and war profiteers like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation (also known as Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman. All of these manufacturers have provided weapons, vehicles, and weapons development to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has made use of them by filling the streets of Gaza with Palestinian blood. 

Museum London, sponsored by TD bank, had its Summer Launch Party on June 11. The event featured the exhibition opening of Franco-Manitoban artist Dominique Rey, titled Motherground. Unlike most of Museum London’s openings, this event was met with a protest, calling for an end to TD Bank’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. 

Arms Embargo Forest City, who organized the protest, is a grassroots coalition of local residents who oppose war profiteers art washing their involvement in international war crimes. Art washing can be defined as the practice of using art, artists, or cultural sponsorships to improve an unethical reputation of a corporation. 

Governmental austerity towards the arts has led us down the path of the private funding of cultural institutions. According to Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships by Mark W. Rectanus, professor of German studies at Iowa State University who researches corporate sponsorships and cultural politics, museums and banks make for uneasy bedfellows. Museums face pressure from community members to make socially responsible choices; pressure from donors to maintain “respectability” and the status quo; and pressure from the Board of Directors to keep the museum fully funded and operational. Curators must ride a delicate line of ethical practice, keeping operative funding in place, maintaining a balanced budget, and engaging the public. As capital has shifted to tech CEOs, cultural philanthropy has gone out of style. The Ford government slashed the OAC Baseline by $5 million in 2018 and cut another $5 million from the Indigenous Culture Fund in 2019. 

In response to the role of TD in local cultural events, the presence of weapons manufacturers like General Dynamics in London, and a need to address Canadian complicity in genocide, the grassroots group Arms Embargo Forest City formed. 

I sat down with one of Arms Embargo Forest City’s organizers, who will remain anonymous for their personal safety. 

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This interview has been edited for brevity.

EL: Thanks for sitting down with me and talking this out. How was the turnout?
ORGANIZER: It was really quite good, there were about a dozen of us; we educated the public. 

EL: Tell me a little bit about your group, your mission, and your demands.
ORGANIZER: We are Arms Embargo Forest City – we’re a group that met at protests over the last three years. We formed a group to conduct research, plan, and effectively launch an arms embargo program locally. Our goal is to build community and apply pressure to our local government and weapons development program. It’s repugnant that Canada recently voted to protect the arms trade. It directly enables the violence in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. We even build the vehicles and sell them to ICE in the States. It is repugnant that Canada continues to invest in genocide. Canada should not be aiding and abetting genocide, it’s a violation of international law. We felt we couldn’t sit by idly while our government aids genocide, is complicit in genocide. It’s our duty to speak up against injustice and Canada’s illegal actions. We’re reaching out to the community to grow in numbers so that we can discuss and plan actions that make an impact on the community and wake them up to the realities. Our targets are the big five banks, all of whom are invested heavily in the Palestinian genocide – one of these is TD Bank. We sourced our data from Just Peace Advocates research, which indicates how much they’ve invested in genocide, especially TD Bank. It’s disgusting that there’s $43 billion invested in genocide from TD. TD has substantial investments in genocide. Their investments grew since the beginning of the genocide. 

Our recent action involved protesting at Museum London’s Summer Launch Party because it was sponsored by TD, and we’re calling out art washing. It wasn’t a screaming event. We respect the artists, those present and highlighted at the event. We understand that sponsorships for the arts are very hard to come by but we’re suggesting that the museum seeks alternatives. We were there with flyers and signs to educate the public with our demands that TD divest from genocide. Even though they’re taking TD Bank’s sponsorship money, we’re asking the Museum Board of Directors to let TD know they’re unhappy with a genocide-enabler sponsoring their event. We ask that Museum London cut ties with TD until they divest from genocide, because we believe it’s our collective ethical duty to ensure our funding aligns with human rights, international law, and the core values of our community. 

We continue to grow, and we intend to continue sustained actions because we believe that’s what’s required against TD. We believe that public pressure can persuade them to do the right thing to protect their image and reputation in the community. We did it before with corporations like Scotiabank. Through protests we have forced Scotiabank to fully divest from genocide because it was ruining their public image. They were forced to do the right thing, not because it was financially prudent but because it hurt their image too much. We believe we can do that with others, if we wake people up to the reality via sustained action and do meaningful things going forward. 

We are trying to be a local voice that educates people and creates momentum to force the people in power to start doing the right thing.

EL: How are you protecting your organization from backlash right now? 

ORGANIZER: We’ve organized a data security party. We asked organizers to attend –  we did a bit of vetting – and to work on our phones and learn how to take part in actions that are deemed illegal by C-9, which risks criminalizing protest near religious or cultural sites. 

EL: What are your expectations from cultural institutions going forward?

ORGANIZER: We both know what we want—publicly funded arts. We know the arts are good for us. They’re good for us as a community, a culture, and a people. However, they are being cut from public funding. Doug Ford is harsh on the arts. That funding has been severed. Museums and organizations don’t have much choice but to take unethical sponsorships, but the time is soon coming that that’s no longer an excuse. We need to do everything we can to find that funding elsewhere. It’s a fraught issue. We can’t let the arts go underfunded. Doug Ford is connected to the arts accepting dirty genocide money. It’s just about waking people up. We need people to speak up for the arts and say no to our government supporting genocide. We can’t give up before we start. 

EL: How does this action challenge the concept of “artwashing?” More specifically, how TD uses its corporate sponsorship of local heritage to mask its role in financing military contractors?

ORGANIZER: Supporting the artists at Museum London at their launch party? That’s a beautiful event. People are happy. They sponsor Sunfest, they sponsor Wortley Pride, as do various other banks, RBC for example. I think music festivals give the public a positive view of a corporate bank and therefore have limited concerns as to doing business with such an unethical company, so art washing is deceiving the public into thinking they’re good when in fact they’re doing great harm.

EL: I couldn’t help but notice the contrast in narratives in the art exhibition between Dominique Rey’s portrayals of motherhood, which includes the intermingling of human bodies through parenthood, and struggles of Palestinian parents to gather the intermingled remains of their children’s bodies after bombing. Who are we to decide which tales of parenthood matter?  

ORGANIZER: If you have empathy for only some children, you have no empathy at all. If you know Canada is invested in genocide, how are you not complicit?

EL: This action disrupted a single event, but the genocide and corporate funding continue. How is your organization leveraging the momentum from the Museum London protest to build sustained, disruptive campaigns against financial complicity in London?

ORGANIZER: We are narrowing it down, focusing on sustained action. A one off doesn’t do us any good. They’ve suffered no repercussions. We need to maintain sustained action until they make the changes necessary. We’re focused on our local government, arms manufacturers, and banks. 

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The questions for Londoners remain: How much of a presence of genocidal banks will we accept? How many war profiteers can we allow to infiltrate every cultural event in our city? How can we continue to live with it, when it costs the lives of entire families elsewhere? 

It is in our hands locally to address our own role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, especially as the violence overflows from Gaza into Lebanon. 

We all play a role in imperialism. Some of us accept the money, some of us use services that give support to Israel, some of us merely look the other way. 

Can we live with it, knowing the scale of cruelty and death?  

To get involved, email ArmsEmbargoForestCity@proton.me. 

Arms Embargo Forest City invites any like-minded comrades to be in touch with them and are maintaining anonymity because of recent government actions such as Bill C-22.