VANCOUVER — A photographer and the news organization that sent her to cover an anti-pipeline protest in British Columbia are suing the RCMP for wrongful arrest in a case they say has implications for media across the country.
Amber Bracken and The Narwhal are seeking a declaration that Bracken’s arrest in November 2021 at a tiny cabin at a protest camp against the Coast GasLink pipeline in northwestern B.C. was unlawful.
The Narwhal’s acting editor-in-chief Carol Linnitt said in a statement before the trial started in Vancouver on Monday that injunction zones like the one at the protest area allow the RCMP alone to “determine what journalism is, who performs it, where and how.”
“Whatever form of freedom of press we can say we have in this country will utterly wither under these circumstances,” she said.
But Craig Cameron, the lawyer for the Attorney General of Canada, said that Bracken didn’t have the right to breach a court injunction, no matter what she did for a living.
He said “anyone with a cellphone (or) a blog is part of the extended definition of media.”
“A lot of people are in a news-gathering function now, pretty much everyone. So if you’re going to give people gathering information preferential treatment, you’re giving everyone preferential treatments. And what does that even mean?” he said.
Bracken, whose work is published by national news organizations including The Canadian Press, said outside court that the case concerned the media as a whole, and she was happy to see it before the courts.
Bracken was held in detention for three days after her arrest and the charges against her were eventually dropped.
In his opening statement at the start of the civil trial in B.C. Supreme Court, lawyer Sean Hern, who is representing Bracken and the publication, said denying journalists access can have a chilling effect and is bad for democracy.
He said without the presence of people like Bracken, arrests at protests would be hidden and the public would be left to piece together what happened from press releases.
“There would have been a total absence of reliable, impartial and timely information available to the public, and democracy requires more,” he said.
“Reliable information gathered and transmitted to the public by members of the press is a pillar of a functioning democracy.”
The police and government response to the lawsuit says Bracken and several pipeline opponents had occupied a cabin that was barricaded from the inside.
“The occupation of this cabin was intended to, and did, interfere with the construction of the pipeline,” they say, and Bracken was arrested “on reasonable and probable grounds that she breached the injunction order.”
Cameron told the court that Bracken and The Narwhal were trying to establish that journalists should be given “unfettered access” to events and get special treatment.
Cameron said the court would hear that the arrests were necessary and police didn’t know Bracken was in the cabin until they went in to make the arrests.
He said Bracken, however, knew she was likely going to be arrested.
“She knew that was a likelihood, but she stayed in, probably so she could capture the events,” he said. “Which is fine from a journalistic perspective, but it’s not good from a legal perspective.”
Cameron acknowledged that the case is important but said it should be viewed narrowly and not be a broader debate on media access and the RCMP.
Hern told the court that emails about Bracken being there were sent to senior members of the RCMP.
She was in the tiny house with multiple cameras, ID identifying herself as a journalist and a letter from The Narwhal, Hern said.
Hern said it was wrong to label Bracken as an “occupier,” suggesting the role of a journalist is more akin to a visitor, with the job to “observe the occupation and document it for the public.”
He said the changes in the journalistic landscape “do not undermine, in our submission, the core principles of the practice of journalism, nor do they displace its fundamental importance in democracy,” he said.
The Canadian Association of Journalists said in a statement the case is about the journalist-police relationship in Canada that has become “untenable.”
“While Bracken’s case is the one on the docket for Monday morning, she isn’t alone in experiencing this kind of censorship or interference at the hands of police,” it says in a statement.
“Over the past several years, the CAJ has documented multiple examples of how law enforcement across Canada too often arrest or detain journalists on trumped-up charges. The logical conclusion is that those actions are meant to stifle coverage and evade public scrutiny, in which case it is a strategy that criminalizes the act of bearing witness.”
The president of the CAJ is expected to testify as part of the trial, which is scheduled to last five weeks. Multiple reporters who were working in and around the injunction are also on the witness list, while Bracken was expected to take the stand on Tuesday.
In a separate trial of Coastal GasLink protesters that concluded last February, the court heard that a recording device that police seized from Bracken at the time of her arrest continued to capture police conversations.
A judge found the officers whose voices were captured on the recording made “grossly offensive, racist and dehumanizing” remarks about Indigenous women who were arrested at the blockade, and he reduced the protesters’ sentences as a remedy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 12, 2026.
Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press
