Big banks having shitty investment approaches shouldn't be/isn't a surprise, I'd be surprised if anyone thought they were going to be following some sort of ethical code on it.

Community credit unions exist(ed). Community based credit unions tended to invest more locally, in smaller businesses. Even their partnerships were with smaller businesses. Big Banks and Big CUs like Vancity just outsource everything to large international companies (like Vancity's online banking is hosted in Microsoft's cloud, and its run by an Indian firm called Intellect Design, which has most of its development work done in the UAE/Middle East). Banking with any of them, there's absolutely zero chance of having 'privacy' from foreign snooping/pressure. The US has backend access to/the ability to control all our bigger financial institutions, it's one reason their claims of Canada being totally dependent on the US is quite legit. There's been no talk from regulators to try and address the situation -- in fact, BC's regulators want CUs to chase scale/merge together, which puts them all more and more into US clouds -- which is cool with our regulator, seeing as our provincial financial regulator, even, is run via Microsoft's cloud ecosystem.

Those smaller, locally focused, and generally more 'ethical' smaller organisations are basically all toast though -- like I think there's only 1 small, open to the public, non-ethnic based community credit union left in Vancouver. Cause no one cares how a bank invests/partners, all they care about is getting the best rate. And if you get that rate by going with an organization that supports ICE, so be it.