In 2020, at the height of the pipeline fight on Wet’suwet’en territory, Ricochet journalist Jerome Turner was detained by the RCMP in two separate locations for a total of eight hours as he sought to do his job and cover the story. It was one of the first instances in a troubling pattern of police interference with journalists that continues to this day. 

Yesterday, after a five year fight for accountability, the RCMP formally apologized to Turner and his editor, Ethan Cox, for “unreasonable interference with Mr. Turner’s work as a reporter as he was turned away from the checkpoint, threatened with arrest for being within an exclusion zone, detained and had his movements controlled.”

The formal apology, ordered by the commissioner of the RCMP, was one of a series of recommendations in a scathing 70-page report issued by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, the RCMP’s civilian oversight body. 

The CRCC report, covered here for the first time, exhaustively investigated a 2020 complaint by Cox that the force had acted inappropriately by interfering with, obstructing and ultimately detaining Turner. The complaint was upheld in all respects, while several associated complaints about instances of RCMP spokespeople providing incorrect information to the media were found to be accurate, although those officers were themselves provided with incorrect information by other officers and thus were judged to not be at fault. 

Turner, alongside journalists Amber Bracken and Jesse Winter, were awarded the Canadian Association of Journalists highest honour, the President’s Award, in 2020 for their “moral courage” in facing down automatic weapons and unlawful detention to report on a story of significant public interest. 

RCMP commissioner Michael Duheme fully agreed with all but one of the commission’s 14 findings and four recommendations, acknowledged serious errors were made by members of the national police force, including at the leadership and policy level, and committed to implement a series of policy changes designed to safeguard the rights of journalists. 

“The RCMP approached Mr. Turner and other reporters with disquiet and distrust, relying on coercive powers to exclude, control, and inhibit them rather than take the constructive path of dialogue and mutual respect between two different but equally hardworking groups with equally important roles,” wrote CRCC chair Michelaine Lahaie. 

In responding to the report, the RCMP commissioner agreed with its findings that the police force had acted unreasonably on eight different occasions, including failing to uphold the police force’s duties under the Charter and acting in ways that were inconsistent with the jurisprudence, common law, the Charter and RCMP policy. 

“The RCMP Commissioner fully support[s] the Commission’s recommendations that the RCMP should grant freedom of movement to the media so long as they remain outside a very modest buffer zone around things like arrests, and that the RCMP escorts or liaisons (if needed) should not interfere with the media’s freedom of movement unless to the minimum extent necessary if there is an objectively reasonable operational necessity.” 

The commissioner also agreed with the CRCC’s recommendation that the force issue a formal apology to Cox and Turner, and a letter of apology was delivered yesterday. 

Across 70 pages, the report provides a painstaking summary of Canadian legal jurisprudence, covering superior court decisions in multiple provinces and leaning heavily on the Fleming v. Ontario decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. 

It paints an irrefutable picture that the policy of excluding journalists, restricting their movements and detaining them is unacceptable under law and jurisprudence and inconsistent with Charter rights. 

This document is sure to serve as a keystone of press freedom in Canada for years to come, and influence future decisions around violations of journalists’ rights. 

Brent Jolly,  the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, was provided with a copy of this report, and gave Ricochet the following statement. 

“This response from the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission is a historic and unprecedented acknowledgment of the systemic flaws that have been exposed by years of press freedom advocacy related to how the RCMP has improperly attempted to obstruct journalists from covering matters of considerable public interest in injunction zones. 

Secrecy is an anathema to democratic society. The impact of this decision has the potential to be seismic. Not only does the decision reflect the long-imbalanced relationship with law enforcement and journalists but, more importantly, it provides clear steps to ensure the scales of power are recalibrated and that Canadian journalists are able to document and bear witness to events in service of everyone’s right to information.”

A five year fight for accountability

This outcome is not only the culmination of a five year process seeking accountability for police misconduct in this specific case, but a major victory in an ongoing fight between journalists and the police over our right to access and cover police activities — a fight that was in many ways kicked off by the RCMP’s restrictions on journalists during the Wet’suwet’en blockades. 

Last year two journalists, Brandi Morin in Edmonton and Savanna Craig in Montreal, were arrested and charged with obstruction by municipal police forces in remarkably similar circumstances. In both cases charges were dropped in the face of public outrage. 

In November 2021, photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested with documentary filmmaker Michael Toledano while reporting on the construction of the controversial pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory. The charges were dropped in December 2021. At the time, the RCMP stated that the reason for arresting the two was because they had “embedded” with the protestors, which has never been illegal in Canada. Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court Justice Derek Green affirmed these rights when he found in favour of journalist Justin Brake who faced criminal and civil charges after spending several days inside the Muskrat Falls site covering a protest that shut work down at the dam in 2016. The civil charges were dismissed in 2019 by Justice Green. The criminal charges, too, were subsequently dropped. 

In 2021 a coalition of media outlets (led in part by Ricochet), took the RCMP to court seeking a specific order instructing RCMP officers at Fairy Creek to provide access to the media. During hearings for that application, an RCMP officer who baselessly accused a prominent journalist of misconduct was found to have provided evidence that was “plainly inaccurate and without substance.” The media coalition won the case on all points, and the RCMP was reminded of its obligation to provide media access. However, RCMP officers continued to obstruct and interfere with journalists notwithstanding the court’s ruling. That case is cited extensively in the current report. 

But even as municipal forces appear to be copying the RCMP’s playbook, the RCMP may now be backing away from an approach to the media that, as this report makes clear in excruciating detail, with footnotes to decisions by superior courts in multiple provinces and the Supreme Court of Canada, cannot be justified in a free and democratic society. 

‘The Commission has repeatedly found that the RCMP acted unreasonably’

In a nutshell, the RCMP developed a new approach to conducting arrests and raids on isolated blockades and protest camps, predominantly Indigenous, in the 2010s. This approach consisted of establishing a broad exclusion zone around the site of planned enforcement, and denying journalists entry to cover their actions. 

This tactic evolved from blockades at Wet’suwet’en to those at Fairy Creek, and the size of exclusion zones was made smaller while journalists were allowed marginally more access. 

But, as chair Michelaine Lahaie wrote in a different report released late last year and dealing with police restrictions at Fairy Creek, the CRCC has repeatedly advised the RCMP that exclusion zones are unacceptable, and the RCMP has not been listening. 

“The SCC wrote [in Fleming v. Ontario] that granting intrusive ancillary police powers in response to the mere possibility of an unlawful or disruptive act occurring in the future would allow profound intrusions on liberty with little benefit to society.”

“By the date of the final report in this case,” Lahaie continued, “the Commission had reviewed multiple public complaints about the actions of the RCMP C-IRG in enforcing injunctions in British Columbia in 2020 and 2021. The Commission has repeatedly found that the RCMP acted unreasonably in claiming authority for invasive police powers like access control points and exclusion zones. Although the RCMP Commissioner’s support for the Commission’s findings and his substantive support for the Commission’s recommendations should be celebrated, the Commission pointed out that the frequently unreasonable actions of the RCMP C-IRG mean that the Commission has made substantially the same findings and policy recommendation three more times in subsequent reports.” 

In other words, there is a certain frustration at the oversight body that the RCMP’s leadership continues to agree with and accept their rebukes, while ground-level officers continue to commit the same offences. 

In this case, it remains to be seen how RCMP officers in the field will modify their behaviour in response to this report. 

Nevertheless, this report, and the RCMP commissioner’s unqualified acceptance of its stinging criticisms, and willingness to issue a formal apology to the affected journalists, is the most significant victory yet in the fight against police restrictions on press freedom in Canada. 

The one recommendation that the RCMP commissioner did not fully accept, happens to be one on which the media industry largely agrees with the police force, and must disagree with the oversight body. 

The CRCC recommended that the RCMP establish a method of accrediting journalists for planned and unplanned events. The RCMP considers this logistically unworkable, while the media industry largely agrees with the Supreme Court of Canada that a journalist is defined by their actions, not their affiliations. 

The passerby who filmed the police killing of George Floyd performed a seminal act of journalism, and was even rewarded with an honourary Pulitzer for their efforts. Yet, they would have met no standard for accrediting a journalist. 

In the modern world, as the Supreme Court has noted, anyone can serve a journalistic function by pulling out their phone. Therefore we must define journalists by their actions in the moment, such as observing and reporting on events without participating in them, and their dissemination of information to an external audience. 

This definition of a journalist has been established by the Supreme Court, and should be considered a settled question. The RCMP should not be put in a position where they are empowered to decide who is and is not a ‘real’ journalist, as that power could easily lead to the type of abuses considered in this report.