Today, Friday, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) hosts its annual shareholders meeting in Halifax. Local activists, including the Raging Grannies, will be on hand to send the shareholders a message.

They are part of a broad international campaign to pressure the RBC board of directors to disassociate from one of its members and policy advisors, J. Pedro Reinhard. In addition to his work for the RBC since 2000, Reinhard sits on and advises the boards of Coca-Cola Co. and Dow Chemical, two corporations that refuse responsibility for gross human rights and ecological crimes.

February 19 marked a national day of action that saw trade unionists, students and activists leafleting RBC branches across the country. Larry Wortell is a human rights activist in Victoria working with churches, parents associations and student groups to eliminate Coke contracts in the school system and to prevent the company from sponsoring the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. His network is leafleting RBC branches all week.

“We have focused on RBC to demand that they have J. Pedro Reinhard leave either the RBC board or the Coke board,” says Wortell. “If he doesn’t leave either board we’re asking investors to dump RBC from their portfolios.”

Larry Wells, of the Canadian Autoworkers Union local 707, coordinated information pickets of RBC branches in Hamilton, Toronto, London and Kingston under the umbrella of the Oakville and District Labour Council.

“Reinhard has more ties to people being killed or murdered than people realize,” he says.

Reinhard has been a director at Coke since 2003. In 2001, the International Labor Rights Fund and the United Steelworkers of America filed a lawsuit against Coca-Cola Co. and its Colombian bottlers on behalf of Sinaltrainal, a Colombian trade union that represents workers at Coke’s bottling plants. The lawsuit charges that Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained, or otherwise silenced trade union leaders.”

Coke dodged that suit, which is under appeal, while blocking any independent public investigation into the nine murders and 179 human rights violations related to their bottlers.

Reinhard joined Dow Chemical in 1970 and has been a director since 2001. He is now executive vice president and chief financial officer for the company and is also a member of the Environment, Health and Safety Committee and the office of the CEO. Dow Chemical merged with Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) in 2001.

In one of the worst corporate atrocities in history, more than 8,000 people died in the hours and days following a toxic gas leak from a UCC pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984. The disaster killed another 15,000 people over the past two decades and has left years of debilitating illness suffered by thousands more. The landscape remains poisoned, leaving the surrounding communities without any reliable water source. Dow Chemical and UCC continue to deny responsibility, leaving survivors without appropriate compensation and cleanup.

“This Campaign will urge people and organizations concerned with labour, human rights, and environmental atrocities to organize an aggressive public relations and boycott campaign against RBC until the bank realizes that Reinhard is not an asset but a liability and removes him from the board,” says Ray Rogers, director of the international Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, which called the national day of action.

When contacted for a response to the campaign against Reinhard, RBC senior manager of media and public relations, Beja Rodeck, said that Reinhard was elected to the RBC board by shareholders based on his “expertise and business acumen” and is not there to represent Coca-Cola or Dow.

“It is not our issue,” she said. “It is very much a Coke issue and, I gather, a Dow issue.”

Tony Clarke, director of the Polaris Institute, maintains that RBC is guilty by association. Members of the public-interest research group are participating in this week’s information pickets at RBC branches.

“If the Royal Bank continues to want to be associated with these two companies and the disasters they’ve been involved in then go right ahead and keep Reinhard on the board,” he says. “But it means, quite simply, that the Royal Bank is going to be continuously implicated in the activities of these two corporations.”

Javier Correa, President of the Sinaltrainal union and a Coke employee in Columbia, says that the Canadian campaign will make a difference for workers’ rights in his country.

“I believe that through this network of solidarity, the people in Canada can push Reinhard to recognize the situation in Columbia and to support the right of unions to organize,” he says. “I hope that the board of Coke, and especially Reinhard, will respond and respond positively to our demands.”

According to the Canadian Bankers Association, RBC recorded the largest assets, topping $360 billion, of any domestic bank as of 2001.

You can send a letter to the Royal Bank right here.