When the RCMP told journalist Jerome Turner that his detainment on February 19th, 2020, was for his own safety, he was not convinced. “The only time I questioned my safety was when the police had their weapons trained on me,” Turner wrote.
The RCMP issued a formal apology to reporter Jerome Turner, and his editor Ethan Cox of Ricochet Media on February 19th, five years after they detained the journalist while he was reporting on the Wet’suwet’en pipeline conflict. This apology comes after increasing RCMP-related incidents with journalists reporting on Indigenous land disputes, and a report issued by the RCMP overseeing body, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, that determined the national police force’s actions to be “unreasonable.”
The apology was in the form of a letter from Staff Sgt. Major Kent MacNiel of the RCMP’s North District, APTN reports. In the letter, the RCMP expresses “regret over the improper actions and decisions made by Assistant Commissioner Brewer, Staff Sergeant Shoihet, Corporal Manseau, Corporal Martin, and Civilian Member Roberts which led to unreasonable interference with Mr. Turner’s work as a reporter.”
This comes after the recent release of an investigative report from the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, and five years after Turner was detained on February 7th, 2020, while reporting on an Indigenous land dispute.
In “Detained at Gidimt’en: Inside the media confinement zone”, Turner says the raid on the site 44-kilometers in, where he was reporting, began in the morning; dropped off by helicopters, 50 RCMP officers moved in to arrest the four land defenders. It was at this point where Turner, moving to get a closer look, had two RCMP officers point rifles at him. However, after telling them he was media personnel, they lowered their weapons.
Continuing towards the school bus, where two of the land defenders were, officers detained both Turner, and the other media official there, a filmmaker. Moved to a ditch with little view of the school bus or tower, both he and the filmmaker were held for four hours. Then, when they were being escorted back to the checkpoint, a roadblock was being cleared, and so they were held for another four hours, before being released.
The Wet’suwet’en Coastal Gaslink conflict is centred on the refusal of the nation’s hereditary chiefs to allow the construction of what the CBC calls a “multi-billion dollar natural gas project,” on their traditional territory. Although the company has received approval from the province of British Columbia and several First Nation band councils, the hereditary chiefs are the Supreme-Court-recognized authority for the land since it is unceded.
The conflict has been ongoing since 2012.
On December 31st. 2019, a judge had sided with the pipeline company and ordered an “interlocutory injunction,” which instructs land defenders to stop blocking the company’s access to the site. A week later, Coastal Gaslink received an eviction notice from the hereditary chiefs, and in a news conference, they demanded the exit of the RCMP from their territory, and the end to the project’s permits.
After requesting meeting with both the federal and provincial governments, the premier at the time, John Horgan, sent B.C. Indigenous Relations Minister Sean Fraser to meet with the hereditary chiefs, and later MP Nathan Cullen as an intermediary. Despite a seven-day pause on the injunction enforcement for the talks, by February 4th, the RCMP, the hereditary chiefs, and the provincial government had announced that the negotiations had failed.
In the following two days, the RCMP continues their enforcement of the injunction. It was at this point that Turner arrived to report on the conflict.
According to his personal recount of that day in his article, he was originally refused entry to the restricted area, with RCMP officers stating that he didn’t have the right press credentials. He quickly proceeded to the closest town with phone service to talk to his editor, Ethan Cox, writing that he could sense that tensions between the RCMP, and the land defenders were about to boil over.
With printed credentials in hand, he returned to the checkpoint, and after listing the previous media outlets he had worked for, Turner was allowed entrance.
Moving further into the injunction, to Gidimt’en, the Wet’suwet’en site 44 kilometres in, Turner heard reports over the radio that the two journalists at the site 39 kilometres in were arrested in the raid that had just occurred there.
Cox became worried, he wrote later, and reached out to the RCMP, seeking assurance that Turner wouldn’t be arrested. RCMP spokesperson Janelle Shoihet told Cox that, because Turner was in the injunction area, he was “subject to all the same restrictions as anyone else within the zone,” and that if he did not leave, he would “be subject to arrest.”
This response led to public outcries from journalistic organizations, including the BC Civil Liberties Association, who sent a letter to the RCMP, reminding them that “even in areas where injunctions are being enforced, the courts have upheld the constitutionally protected freedom of the press.” The RCMP later backtracked, issuing a statement that they would not arrest, detain or interfere with the press.
That same day, Turner was detained for 8 hours by RCMP officers.
This wasn’t the last encounter Ricochet Media’s journalists had with the RCMP. As stated in a Globe and Mail article co-authored by Cox, journalist Brandi Morin was arrested while reporting on RCMP action in a homeless encampment for the news outlet in January 2024. In her own reflection on the events, Morin said that the irony of “an Indigenous journalist detained on ancestral lands while documenting the displacement of her own people,” wasn’t lost on her. “The attempt to silence me has only amplified my determination to speak louder, see clearer, and fight harder for justice through journalism,” Morin wrote.
That fight is one that has been more challenging in the past two decades, due to the history of press freedom and issues around the use of media exclusion zones — a term referring to spaces where media access is denied by the RCMP. According to a report by Canada Press Freedom, the RCMP carried out “16 denials of [media] access” between the months of May and September 2021.
In 2016, journalist Justin Brake was arrested while reporting on a land defender protest of a hydroelectric generating site in Newfoundland and Labrador, with charges dropped three years later.
Additionally, in 2021, photojournalist Amber Bracken was also arrested while reporting on the same Wet’suwet’en pipeline conflict as Turner. She later filed a lawsuit against the RCMP, alongside the Narwhal, the news outlet she was working for at the time of her arrest. The executive editor of the Narwhal, Carol Linnitt told CBC that “[t]he arrest and detainment of Amber Bracken should never have happened.”
There was also the media access denial conflict in Fairy Creek, B.C., which was a prominent moment for the RCMP and the press, when several news outlets took the RCMP to court after widespread media exclusion zones and journalist arrests.
The court case victory was a “watershed moment in the history of Canadian press freedom advocacy,” according to Brent Jolly, the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
While several of these cases have been taken to court, this is the first formal apology the RCMP has issued.
The complaint filed by Turner and Cox led to a report from the Civilian Reviews and Complaints Commission (CRCC), which is the overseeing body of the RCMP. The RCMP claimed that their restrictions on the access to the exclusion zone were legal under ancillary power, considering the span of the injunction and their concerns the land defenders would set traps. Ancillary power is the ability of RCMP to interfere with “a person’s liberty or privacy” if it is the only way to do their jobs effectively.
They also argued that, during the second half of Turner’s detainment period, they were worried that Turner would use his car to block the road if he were released, and that during the first half, his detainment was for his safety.
The report concluded that “the RCMP’s threat to arrest the reporter if he did not leave the exclusion zone was unreasonable,” and as was their “use of the checkpoint and exclusion zone to restrict the access and movements of journalists.”
The commission made four recommendations, including a reiteration of a previous recommendation for a nation-wide policy for “the enforcement of civil injunctions,” and a national policy for the standardization of media credentials. It equally suggested a change in how and when media escorts interfere with journalist access, as well as an apology from “an appropriate member of the RCMP.”
In their response, the commissioner agreed to all but one of these recommendations, stating that, although they agreed with the aim of the standardized accreditation policy for journalists, it would be too difficult to implement on both a planned-action and unplanned-action basis.
Turner and Cox also disagreed with that recommendation, stating in their co-written article for Ricochet Media that, “a journalist is defined by their actions, not their affiliations,” especially in a time when a journalist can be anyone who records the truth simply “by pulling out their phone.” Turner goes on to say in a CBC article, “That’s just a step towards totalitarianism, having the Canadian national police force determine who gets to be a journalist.”
While satisfied to see something come from their “five-year fight for accountability,” as Cox called it in one of his articles, neither of them are quite ready to call it a victory, at least not until “we see these promised changes implemented on the ground,” he said in a post on Bluesky.
For his part, Turner says that he accepts the apology conditionally, stating in a CBC article, “I accept [the apology(it)], with the caveat that they don’t do this to journalists ever again.”
Cover Image: Vladvictoria, Pixabay
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