Jailed For Doing Their Jobs

It is an action worthy of a third-world nation. You know, the kind run by an authoritarian who takes it as a personal affront whenever someone demonstrates against or writes about human rights abuses, lashing out with incarceration or worse for the offending parties.

Only this time it is happening in Canada.

Two journalists reporting from the Wet’suwet’en territory were among 15 people arrested and detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia Friday night. Both remain in custody.

Since last year, media has covered RCMP raids in the territory, Indigenous rights and police removal of defenders of the land who are blocking the logging of old-growth forests in the area.

Photographer Amber Bracken was on assignment for The Narwhal when she was arrested. Filmmaker and photographer Michael Toledano, a freelance reporter who has been living in Wet’suwet’en territory in order to create a documentary about what Indigenous people face in the region, was also arrested.

Despite having all the right credentials attesting to their journalistic enterprises, both are still in jail and slated to be transported to Prince George tomorrow for a bail hearing.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly may know that I have a deep respect for the work journalists do. Despite the odd number being mere mouthpieces for propaganda, most are hard at work in an often thankless job, disseminating the kind of information crucial to an informed democracy.

None of  this, it would seem, matters a whit to the RCMP, despite the fact that they are now engaging in clearly illegal action.

The Narwhal said in statements posted to Twitter that they are “extremely disturbed” to learn that Bracken was arrested and that the RCMP is refusing to release her in violation of her charter rights.

Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), says that the two arrests are unjustified.

“It’s completely and utterly shocking the extent to which the RCMP are going to prevent journalists from covering events that are happening in the public interest,” he said. 

The action is especially shocking in light of a court ruling last summer.

In July, the Canadian Association of Journalists, a non-profit that works to defend press freedom and connect reporters across the country, along with multiple other journalism organizations won a court challenge at the Supreme Court in B.C. on press freedom in the Fairy Creek area.

 They urged the court to modify an injunction that would tell the RCMP to stop restricting media from the area without an operational reason to do so. The final decision from the judge agreed with the media groups, explaining that the RCMP had failed to prove why they needed to exclude media from covering the region.

Media have argued they need to be present to document police actions on the territory, where the Wet’suwet’en people say they have never ceded or given up their land.

Jolly says the recent arrests demonstrate that the ruling has fallen on deaf ears.

Our country has many things to be proud of. Suppressing freedom of the press clearly is not one of them.