Rain hammered down on December 8 as Will O’Connel stood beside his truck on a muddy logging road near the Walbran Valley. Across from him, hundreds of fallen old-growth trees lay scattered — ancient giants reduced to timber. The 34-year-old Vancouver Island school teacher wasn’t blocking the road. He wasn’t chaining himself to equipment or obstructing workers. He was simply there.
That didn’t stop the RCMP from arresting him anyway.
Video footage shared on social media shows O’Connel telling officers he wants to leave the area in his truck and insists he’s not violating the court-ordered injunction. The officer’s response is blunt: “You’re not leaving. You’re under arrest.” After minutes of verbal protest, O’Connel is forced to the ground, cuffed, and taken away. Hours later, he was released without charges.
“They’re creating exclusion zones wherever they deem fit,” O’Connel told Ricochet Media, frustration evident in his voice. “It contradicts the injunction order. Protesters are supposed to be free to be in the area as long as we aren’t blocking workers.”
His lawyer, Noah Ross, agrees. “It isn’t clear to me how there was any reasonable probable grounds that he was breaching the injunction at that time,” Ross said. “It appears that he was just on the road in the area. The injunction explicitly protects the rights of the public to be present in the injunction area if they’re engaging in lawful protest, and there’s nothing indicating that Will was about to do anything that wasn’t related to that.”
The RCMP defended their actions in a statement to Ricochet: “With regards to the injunction, the police enforcement clause authorizes the RCMP to arrest and remove any persons who have knowledge of this court order and who the police have reasonable and probable grounds to believe is contravening or contravened the order.”
Ben Isitt, another lawyer working alongside Ross, is preparing to file an affidavit accusing the RCMP of contempt of court for violating the injunction itself. “We’re looking at bringing an application to find the RCMP in contempt of court for interfering with people’s use of roads in the injunction area,” Isitt explained. “They’re interfering with people’s lawful use of roads by setting up roadblocks, harassing individuals. We have extensive evidence of them interfering with people’s lawful use of Crown lands and Crown roads in the injunction area.”
A war on two fronts
For O’Connel, the December 8 arrest was just another day in what has become a grinding, months-long battle. Since August, he and roughly 20 other land defenders have been living in the forest, blocking access to logging companies Tsawak-Qin Forestry Limited Partnership and Tsawak-Qin Forestry Inc. They’ve converted an old school bus into makeshift living quarters, a warm refuge against the cold, rainy winter weather.
The B.C. Supreme Court issued an injunction against the defenders in September, but the RCMP only began enforcement in mid-November. More than two dozen people have been arrested since then.
Most, like O’Connel, keep going back.
“It’s all on the brink right now,” O’Connel said during a phone interview from the bus, via satellite wifi. “Everything is hanging by a thread.”
The physical toll is immense. Defenders trek for hours through thick forests, bushwhacking in torrential rain to evade RCMP patrols and industry workers. They scout locations for tree sits, attempt to block roads, and push their bodies to the limit in below-freezing temperatures. Just days before O’Connel’s arrest, the area was hit with a “weather bomb” that dumped 100 millimeters of rain in a single day.
But it’s the emotional weight that’s harder to measure.
“I think there was a moment where I just didn’t know how much longer I could go on,” O’Connel admitted. “It actually has been one of the hardest things in my life. Definitely the whole blockade has been the hardest.”
He paused, then added: “But still, all you do is stay. And then you just keep going on.”
“Now it feels kind of like wartime.”
For nearly five months, O’Connel and his fellow defenders have braved the elements, RCMP harassment, and the creeping certainty that many of the trees they came to protect are already gone. The area they initially set up camp to defend has seen dozens of old-growth trees felled. Logging companies have deployed four fallers in the block instead of the usual two, working long days to clear the cut blocks as quickly as possible, explained O’Connel.
“They’re falling trees so close to one another,” O’Connel said. “It’s like they’re right next to each other, just falling trees. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
A forest defender is seen climbing a giant 600-year-old cedar that was set to be cut down. The activists snuck undetected past the exclusion zones, police patrol cars and checkpoints to set up this tree sit. Photo via IG
Despite the losses, O’Connel says the fight was never really about saving one specific grove. The cut blocks they’re defending aren’t the iconic “big trees” that drew thousands to Fairy Creek in 2021. Some had already been partially logged before the blockade even began. But that, he says, is exactly the point.
“I’ve realized there isn’t time to wait for those trees to be in jeopardy because it’s the moment — it’s the moment to fight,” O’Connel said. “We’re not fighting really in a place or in a group or anything. We’re fighting in a moment in time. I’m worried that if we don’t find action in this moment, we’ll never find action in any moment.”
It’s a profound shift in perspective. At Fairy Creek, over a thousand people were arrested in an effort to save some of Canada’s last unprotected old-growth rainforest. But despite the massive mobilization, the approved cut blocks were still logged. The lesson, O’Connel says, is that once chainsaws hit a grove, it’s already too late. The real fight is for policy change — for a future where places like this are never approved for logging in the first place.
“These forests are so special,” he said. “They deserve more than us. They deserve the devotion of all of the people of British Columbia. They deserve better than just 20 of us. They deserve all of us.”
David vs. Goliath — with helicopters
The disparity in resources is staggering. On any given day, O’Connel estimates there are 40 RCMP officers stationed in the area, supported by helicopters, police drones, excavators, and other heavy machinery. At night, about 10 officers remain on patrol. The defenders, meanwhile, number around 20 — sometimes fewer. They’re determined, with knowledge of the land, and what O’Connel describes as a kind of desperate clarity.
“Now it feels kind of like wartime,” he said. “We’ve created a lot of ruckus for not very many people.”
Despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, O’Connel believes the defenders have an edge. “We’re outworking them, frankly. We’re tougher than them. We’re actually smarter than them,” he said. “There’s something — if you ever read The Art of War — they say never back an army up against the wall because they’ll fight like 10 armies. And it feels like that today, just realizing that these last forests are going and they’re gonna find out that we’re not gonna let them go easy.”
On the day of the interview, O’Connel and several other defenders had just returned from a grueling six-hour trek through the bush, evading RCMP and scouting new locations to block logging operations. They navigated cliffs, waded through creeks, and were tracked by a police drone. It’s exhausting, dangerous work — but it’s also, in O’Connel’s mind, necessary.
“You get to a certain depth of the forest, you walk like 10 minutes out — you know there’s no officers out there,” he said. “But if you bushwhack for six hours, you’re not even thinking about them. They’re out of their element out here. We’re in ours.”
The weight of it all
Unlike Fairy Creek, which at its peak drew hundreds of supporters and became a national flashpoint, the Walbran blockade feels smaller, quieter, more isolated. There’s no massive public outcry. No daily headlines. Just a handful of people in a school bus, doing everything they can to hold the line.
“When you only have a few people, you feel a lot of weight and a lot of responsibility,” O’Connel said. “You can’t just step away when you need to step away, or when you want to step away.”
The community within the camp has been a lifeline. “We’ve got warm spaces and we’ve got caring people, and it helps a lot,” he said. But even that can’t entirely shield defenders from the grinding reality of what they’re up against.
O’Connel is frank about the odds. He knows, logically, that the trees will likely fall. That the approved cut blocks will be logged. That 20 people, no matter how committed, can’t stop an entire industry backed by court orders and police enforcement.
“I don’t know, it’s like a weird thing because logically, you know, we know it’s gonna fall. But we’re making a stand for all of our ancient forests.”
What comes next
Even if the current cut blocks are logged, O’Connel says the fight won’t end. There are still two intact cut blocks with no road access, and another with a right-of-way cut but no built road. The defenders plan to stay, to hunker down, to keep fighting.
“I think they think, ‘Oh, these trees are on the ground, it’s over,'” O’Connel said. “And I think we kind of feel that way too. But I also don’t think it’s gonna end.”
For now, the defenders are regrouping. Planning. Bracing for what comes next. They’re outnumbered, outspent, and exhausted. But they’re still there.
