The RCMP seriously interfered with press freedoms, unfairly blocked access to the media and arbitrarily arrested a reporter during a 2020 raid in the blockades led by Wet’suwet’en in northern British Columbia, says the review body of force.
Five years after that operation, the Mounties formally apologized with the plaintiff Ethan Cox, senior editor of the Independent News Store Ricochet Media, and the reporter of Gitxsan Jerome Turner, for violating the rights Charter of Turner.
“I appreciate this apology. I think it’s tremendous,” said Cox, who praised the findings of the review as precedents.
“I think it is a step in the right direction, but you have to continue with the action, and that action has to drip towards the officers in the front line.”
Signed by staff sergeant. The greatest Kent Macneill, the letter of repentance of February 19 of force was a welcome surprise for Turner, who accepts the apology, with a condition.
“I accept it, with the warning that they do not do this again,” he said.
The reprimand of the review commission and civil complaints adds to a list of racist or unconstitutional behavior of the community industry response group (C-IIR) of the RCMP.
Last week, a BC judge found that C-IIR violated charter rights by commenting “to a large extent offensive, racist and dehumanizing” about the women of the first nations during another foray into the blockages led by Wet’suwet’en against the construction of the coastal gas link pipe in 2021.
The past fall, the review body criticized C-IIR for its illicit arrest of hiker Brian Smallshaw, criticizing the unit for its “disproportionately intrusive methods”, in Fairy Creek’s anti-Logging blocks in 2021.
Meanwhile, the Complaints Commission is already carrying out a systemic investigation into the unit, which was renamed the critical response unit, or CRU-BC, in the midst of federal investigation last year.
While he has been taking years, Cox suggests that chickens are arriving home to be prostrate for a unit that show that the documents were created to defend the pipes of indigenous activists and environmentalists.
“The systemic review that comes out later this year will perhaps even more scathing, and I hope that leads to the RCMP to get rid of the C-RIRG,” Cox said.
“I don’t think the C-RIG is defensible. I don’t think it is redeemable. It is a really bald exercise of surveillance in the industry service.”
Turner was assigned to cover the resistance of Wet’suwet’en to the Coastal Gaslink pipe in 2020. That February, RCMP extended to enforce a court order against the blockages that interfere with the construction of the pipe.
Turner was previously granted access to the area, says the review, but an RCMP member told him that the “rules had changed.” Instead, Mounties excluded Turner, stopped him for hours and threatened him with arrest, strongly reducing his freedom of movement.
‘Examination of police powers’
In the final 70 -page report, the Commission says that the use of RCMP of “access control points and exclusion zones” was not reasonable, qualifying the threats of arresting Turner without foundation and its subsequent unjustified detention.
The behavior of the RCMP was “imperative, poorly considered and possibly illegal”, and the report expresses concern that the media barriers were “a characteristic, not an error” of the operation of the operation.
“Irrazonable behavior of RCMP … caused a substantial and serious interference with the freedom of the press, including Mr. Turner’s ability to inform about an important indigenous matter in public interest, inconsistent with customary law and the Canadian letter of rights and freedoms, “says the commission.
The report says that the RCMP approached Turner and other reporters with restlessness and distrust, trusting coercive powers to exclude and control instead of a constructive dialogue. This distrust was based on “vague and speculative” concerns that activists can impeach journalists.
“Officers can deal with such cases when they have a reasonable suspicion of specific irregularities, but it is not reasonable to treat the media as potential adversaries in a general way,” says the commission.
“This leads to a possible suppression of press freedom and an overreach of police powers.”
The review occurs after the RCMP investigated and was eliminated in misconduct in the case, since the commission can only review the complaints when the plaintiff is not satisfied with the RCMP investigation.
In response, the RCMP Commissioner agreed with all the findings and promised to act. The force supported all the recommendations, except one, which requires a standardized policy to prove the reporters.
“There are operational and logistics barriers in the implementation of an effective policy for unplanned events as protests,” said RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme in a letter to the Civil Review and Review Commission.
Cox and Turner were also worried about that recommendation, but for a different reason.
“That is just a step towards totalitarianism, that the force of the Canadian National Police determines who becomes a journalist,” Turner said.
As for coastal Gaslink, the pipe is now mechanically complete and expects the completion of an export terminal of LNG canada in Kitimat, BC
