Gord Nixon, 52 years old and chief executive officer of Canada’s largest bank, drove home from his downtown Toronto office one day in late July as per usual, to his mid-town manse on a neatly tree-lined street. By the time he got home he was apoplectic. The entire route, all the way to his front door, was postered with messages on light poles reading “Help us Mrs. Nixon,” aimed at his wife, Janet. That was in addition to similar notices plastered in the downtown core in the previous weeks. The posters didn’t say who “us” were, but Nixon knew what it was about.

It was the most provocative step to date in a campaign against the Royal Bank of Canada launched by a U.S.-based environmental activist group few in Canada had heard of—the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). The group’s purpose: to stop lending in Canada’s oil sands. Not cut lending, stop lending altogether.

RBC is, to be sure, a formidable target—it’s a bank with over $720 billion in assets. But RAN is also a force to be reckoned with. In the past 15 years, it has managed to get U.S. corporations like Citigroup, Home Depot and Boise Cascade to make concessions on environmental issues. It’s a slick organization posing as a grassroots and granola outfit; it counts a number of Hollywood celebrities among its supporters, and the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund among its donors. But it’s also a radical group that believes in creating a “business nightmare” for its corporate targets, according to its own literature. Its letterhead logo is a black panther, evoking extreme activism of the past, and it trains its members in civil disobedience. Its leaders speak like M.B.A. grads—Mike Brune, its executive director, has an accounting degree from Westchester University, but he has also been arrested at least 11 times.

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