The Council of Canadians took its message to Toronto teachers that their pension fund — the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan — should divest its shares from for-profit, private water utilities in Chile.

Our message — teachers don’t support private water, so neither should their pension fund. The OTPP owns 50.83 per cent of the Chilean water utility Essbio, 69.4 per cent of Esval, and 100 per cent of ANSM.

More than 200 hundred teachers signed our petition with this demand as they left the Air Canada Centre yesterday after their professional development day gathering there.

The pledge for teachers to sign is also available on-line at http://www.canadians.org/water/issues/OTPP/pledge/index.php.

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Brent Patterson

Brent Patterson is a political activist, writer and the executive director of Peace Brigades International-Canada. He lives in Ottawa on the traditional, unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Algonquin...