An investigation into an RCMP raid on Wet’suwet’en territory

Jordan By now, most Canadians are familiar with this pattern. A natural resource company wants some land, often to build a pipeline. But that land is First Nations territory, or at least disputed territory. So members of that First Nation, along with allies, stand up to defend their land, to make it difficult for construction of the pipeline to begin or continue. And then, and this is the part most Canadians know well, the RCMP moves in.

Clip of RCMP Raid Breaking down the door.

Jordan Over the past two plus years, the most visible example of this has been on Wet’suwet’en land in Northwest British Columbia. And the most notable incident during this ongoing protest has been a raid of the camp that led to dozens of arrests, including of two journalists. That was last November. And over the weeks and months that followed, attention drifted elsewhere, even as the protests and arrests and surveillance continued. As is so often the case with these stories, it is once the media and public attention goes elsewhere that some of the deeper details begin to emerge. That’s certainly the case here. So what do we now know about the raids on Wet’suwet’en land defenders that we didn’t right after they happened? What have we learned about lines of communication between the RCMP and Coastal GasLink and what’s going on there right now? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Matt Simmons is the Northwest B.C. reporter for The Narwhal. Hi, Matt.

Matt Simmons Hello.

Jordan Can you start by taking us back, I guess, almost a year or so, and describing a photo that you guys published in The Narwhal, but that also sort of became notorious beyond that of RCMP officers forcibly entering a house. Can you describe it and sort of tell us what was going on in that picture?

Matt Simmons Absolutely. The Wet’suwet’en defenders and their supporters had occupied a Coastal GasLink pipeline work site just above the Wedzin Kwa, which is also known as the Morice River. And at the top of the hill they set up a tiny house just off the pipeline right of way. And that photo took place on the second day of RCMP enforcement to remove land offenders from occupation of pipeline work sites. At that moment, they had just used an axe that they found lying around in the camp, or not lying around, but in the camp, and a chainsaw to break down the door. And then you see the heavily armed tactical officers pointing their weapons at the people inside, which were Indigenous land offenders and supporters and two journalists. Yeah, it’s quite an image, that’s for sure.

Jordan I know that this is something that’s difficult to summarize, but I do want to get back to the beginning because the past year the news cycle has been insane and memories fade very quickly. Can you run us through why the Wet’suwet’en land defenders were up there and what Coastal GasLink was trying to do. What’s the genesis of this conflict?

Matt Simmons Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It’s difficult to summarize quickly. It’s one of these things that has so many layers and nuances and complexities, but it goes back to colonization, essentially, which is to say that prior to colonization, the Wet’suwet’en had a system of governance. It’s a hereditary system, and that holds authority, as has been upheld in the Supreme Court of Canada in a landmark case that was delivered its ruling in 1997 called Delgamuukw-Gisday’wa. And that affirmed that the Wet’suwet’en and neighbouring Gitksan First Nation have never ceded their rights entitled to the land.

So fast forward to Coastal GasLink putting a project on the table with B.C. government, and the hereditary chiefs say no. But the B.C. government and the proponent, which is TC Energy, formerly Trans Canada, they go through due process, through B.C.’s laws to gain consent of elected chiefs and councils. So five out of six on Wet’suwet’en territory signed agreements with province and the pipeline, the one exception being Hagwilget, which is in Hazelton or near Hazelton.

So essentially the hereditary chiefs have never given consent to the pipeline, and the government authorized the pipeline. And that’s the heart of the conflict. Herditary chiefs say no. B.C. government says yes. Proponent says we’ve been authorized to do this and we have these agreements in place, so what’s the big deal, where the land offenders are acting under the authority of the hereditary chiefs to do all they can to prevent it from going forward, to protect their rights over water and land and resources.

Jordan So they’re defending the unceded territory. And this is where the conflict comes up. And I guess is it the B.C. government that gives the RCMP the green light to go ahead? Who makes that call ultimately–that now is when we’ll start enforcement and we’ll bust into houses and start arresting people?

Matt Simmons Yeah, the B.C. government does authorize deployment of resources, but ultimately the RCMP has discretion over when to enforce. So there’s also this other layer of complexity, which is the B.C. Supreme Court granted an injunction against anyone impeding progress on the pipeline. And so the RCMP are acting on that authority, which is a court ordered injunction to remove people who are blocking or impeding construction. RCMP has the discretion as to when it enforces and how it enforces, and specifically has a discretion over how it conducts arrests, for example. So back to that image. The RCMP ultimately made that choice. They received authorization to deploy extra resources to do so, but they have the final say.

Jordan This all happened in the span of about two days, and it made headlines across the country. There weren’t a lot of explanations then. Tell me about your investigation over the course of the past year. What have you tried to find out and how?

Matt Simmons I guess when it first happened, as most people are probably aware, the RCMP also arrested two journalists who were inside the tiny house at the time of forcing entry. So that was Amber Bracken, who was on assignment for The Narwhal, and freelance documentary filmmaker Michael Toledano. That really blew up in the news.

Jordan Is it fair to say it blew up in a way that it might not have if it was only Indigenous land offenders being arrested by the RCMP?

Matt Simmons I think that’s very fair to say, yes. This is not something that is necessarily new RCMP, or if you look at it in a global scale, the suppression of media coverage of police conduct. This is something that keeps coming up again and again and again. Shortly after all this went down, so it was a Thursday and a Friday, there were two days of intense police activity. 14 arrests on the first day, I believe 15 on the second. That weekend, I was busy working on how to provide coverage of what happened since our photojournalist was incarcerated, along with all her photos, and my managing editor, Mike De Souza, he immediately filed some Access to Information requests to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, because we were all in the dark, really.

There was no the sort of public statements that the RCMP was giving, which were echoed by B.C. ministers and federal ministers. We were skeptical, I think is the right word. And so he filed these requests. I continued on with my reporting on the ground, and then we started gathering what we could, which is audio recordings, video footage, and then went to the courts, asked for affidavits that were filed with courts, basically anything we could get our hands on to check to see if the public messaging was indeed accurate or if it was perhaps misleading.

Jordan What did you get back from the Access to Information request? Maybe without going into exactly what’s in them right now, because we’re going to do that, but when you ask for this stuff, what do you get?

Matt Simmons It’s actually really interesting. So Mike filed two batches of requests, I guess one batch through the federal process, which were directly to the RCMP, and the other batch was to the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. What we got back from each was very different. The RCMP, the federal stuff, was heavily redacted. There wasn’t much there. What you’re seeing essentially is internal emails and communications regarding operations and enforcement. The B.C. side of things was less redacted, still redacted, but less redacted. And it offered more of an insight into how the RCMP was conveying information to senior government officials about what it was doing. And this is leading up to, during and after the arrests.

Jordan So you’ve got two big batches. You start looking through them, you and Mike, and I imagine at least another staff or two, because there’s a lot of it. What’s the first thing that immediately jumps out to you guys?

Matt Simmons Well, there are two things, really. One, was around the arrest of the journalists. So there was some information in there, it referenced the break decision. So this is Justin Brake and they are saying that they instructed all of their officers on the ground to maintain a standard as defined by that case. Basically, journalists have a right to be there. Here are the guidelines for determining what a journalist actually is. And then they went on to say that serve as the Community-Industry Response Group, which is a special unit set up by the RCMP in 2017 to police protests of industrial projects.

Essentially they say that they are preparing a package for the courts that will essentially justify arresting the journalists. So that package never materialized, which is something that stood out to us immediately. And then the other thing that stood out to us was a series of communications between Assistant Commissioner Eric Stubbs. So he’s the second in command in B.C. of the RCMP, and he seemed to be having communications with the Office of the Wet’suwet’en, which is a nonprofit organization that works on behalf of and for the hereditary chiefs about a summit meeting, a meeting to resolve the situation peacefully.

But when we looked at the dates and times they were in these conversations at a point that they had already received approval to deploy the extra resources to conduct the rates that they did. So those two things really stood out to us as being two key points we have. The one, the journalists and their justification for arresting them, which never seemed to go anywhere. And then this attempt to resolve the situation peacefully, but they’d already decided not to do so. Those are the two main points that when we saw them, we wanted to know more.

Jordan Did you show this evidence to the hereditary chiefs?

Matt Simmons I got on a call with Chief Namoks and I just talked him through it.

Jordan How did they react?

Matt Simmons How did he react? Honestly, he wasn’t surprised. I think from his perspective. He’s seen this now for a very long time. He’s seen the conduct on the ground. He’s also been in all these meetings and he’s had discussions with senior government officials, had conversations with RCMP, and yeah, frankly he said, this is pretty much what I expect from them. I don’t expect anything less, I believe is the words he used.

Jordan What did the RCMP say? I guess Stubbs in particular–when you asked about the apparent contradictions?

Matt Simmons It was very interesting. Going through communications with RCMP, we put questions directly to Stubbs and to the Gold, Commander of the Community Industry Response Group. But then the answers were funnelled back through their Media Communications department. At first it was really hard to figure out if Stubbs and Brewer were actually responding, although the responses would be in the first person. So that was an indication that, yes, they were indeed the ones responding to it.

As for the responses from Stubbs, with that contradiction between having the meeting and already having received approval. He denied an allegation that a source told me, described it, including the mocks, described it as a form of blackmail. He denied that. He said the situation was there were people trapped behind the blockades. There were approximately 500 workers at two man camps behind where land offenders had closed access and said, I believe it would be difficult to convene a summit meeting in the time allotted they needed to get in there. In other words, and this was a consistent narrative, they described it as a rescue mission, essentially for these workers.

Jordan You mentioned a few minutes ago that you were also gathering recordings, videos, anything that was made sort of on the ground while those arrests were happening. What kind of stuff did you get from that?

Matt Simmons I’ll give full credit to Amber Bracken here because she had the wherewithal to start recording a voice memo on her phone, I guess, as the police were forcing entry into that tiny house. And thankfully it just kept running until her phone eventually died. So in the first few minutes or the first 20 minutes or so, you hear her asking officers about the Brake decision and if they’re aware of it and they say, no, they’re not aware of it, which the RCMP told us that all of the officers on the ground were briefed on the Brake decision. So there was a bit of a contradiction there.

And then later, as I understand it from listening to the audio, it’s all over the place and there’s all kinds of horrible noises as her phone is presumably being packed into a bag or a box or a tote or something. But later you hear a couple of RCMP officers joking about the people they arrested and making some really horrible comments, very racist and derogatory comments about the people they arrest, and just laughing about it. It was hard to listen to, frankly. It’s really hard to listen to.

Jordan Did you get a chance to ask anybody through the RCMP comms department, I guess, about that?

Matt Simmons Yeah, I did ask. The response was first they wanted me to provide a copy of the recording, but as per journalistic ethics guidelines, we don’t provide anything we’ve acquired, but we offered to play it for them. I offered to get on the phone with them and play them the recordings and then ask them to comment on it and they declined. They said they would need a copy of the recording to cross check it with who was on the ground.

Jordan In the month since, has there been any reflection of Amber Bracken shouldn’t have been arrested? Those were horrible comments made by our officers and we’ll look for discipline, or is the public face of this that we had to do this and we did it and that’s it?

Matt Simmons That’s pretty much it, yeah. The public face of it and all the responses that they gave to our request or questions were pretty much they’re sticking to their guns. They’re staying the course on, we did this, we were enforcing an injunction. It’s all above board, essentially.

Jordan What’s happening on that land right now?

Matt Simmons There’s a lot happening on the land right now. It’s really tense, to be honest, and unpleasant. So the Community Industry Response Group has been conducting daily patrols, and that’s how they describe it to me when I ask questions. Around the Gidimt’en camp, which is a reoccupation of the land, which is off the road. It’s not blocking any work sites. And there’s a cabin there, sort of like a two story cabin, series of small structures, out house, fire pit. It’s a gathering place. Across the street there’s a series of tiny houses at the confluence of Lamprey Creek and the Wedzin Kwa River. And RCMP have been going into these spaces multiple times a day.

Earlier in the year, it was in the middle of the night. They come three, four in the morning, and we’re talking anywhere from six to 15 officers. And they come in and they walk around. They don’t actually go into any of the tents or structures, but they walk through the gates. And Coastal GasLink security is also posted right outside the camps. There’s usually two trucks sitting there. They video anyone walking on the road or being present in that area. And the land offenders and the Wet’suwet’en community members who are out there are understandably not happy about that continued presence in their territory. So there will be words exchanged and heated exchanges and the police will go, but it’s quite something. The Wet’suwet’en are currently building a feast hall right at Lamprey Creek there. And since they started building, there seems to have been an increase in RCMP presence. Which I haven’t been out since the feast hall, since they started building the feast hall, but when you watch those social media posts, it just has an ugly tone to it, all of it.

Jordan This is perhaps a dumb question, but is the pipeline currently being built right now?

Matt Simmons Yeah, it’s proceeding. So this is another thing about being out there which you don’t really see in media coverage. This road, it’s way out there, it’s 45 minutes from the nearest town-ish, but it’s like a superhighway for construction. So there are constantly trucks going and heavy vehicles, equipment going back and forth from town and out to the site. And while the pipeline company has closed access to the location where the camps were, where the arrests happened, the tiny house, that iconic image, that’s the drill site. So they’re planning to drill under the river, which is certainly a point of contention for those who don’t want to see the project go ahead. But yeah, there’s lots of activity going on.

Jordan My last question, I guess, is what happens next? Even given all we’ve just discussed about last November and that action, you’ve also just described an increasingly untenable situation.

Matt Simmons Yeah, I mean, frankly, I’m concerned about the possibility of it just getting worse, more arrests or I don’t even know. It’s hard to know what happens next. Right. My understanding right now, and as has been seen in media, is the land defenders and their supporters are trying to take it to the international stage. So the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued a third rebuked Canada, about the pipeline and especially about the police and security presence and has called on Canada to remove RCMP and private security forces from Wet’suwet’en territory immediately. And this is the third time they’ve asked for that. And so I feel like there’s almost a sense of desperation and appeal to the international community to support that and to prevent any further conflict on the ground.

Jordan One last question. Has the BC government given any indication that they’re willing to step up and help find a conclusion, if not to tell the RCMP to back down? What are they saying about this? It’s been quite some time now.

Matt Simmons They are surprisingly tight-lipped about it, to be honest. So I also always submit questions to, for example, the likes of the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. And those questions that I ask are rarely answered directly, if at all. And whenever I press for answers or follow up with extra questions based on their responses, I’m often met with we’ve said all we can say about this.

I know there are people within the B.C. government who continue to speak with the hereditary chiefs, but my understanding is the hereditary chiefs don’t really see it as a good faith process without first removing the RCMP from the territory.

Jordan I mean, I can’t blame them for that.

Matt Simmons No.

Jordan Matt, thank you so much for explaining this to us and our listeners. I think a lot of us probably didn’t have an idea of just how tense it still was there and we’ll keep in touch with you guys as we go forward.

Matt Simmons Yeah, thank you for having me.

Jordan Matt Simmons of The Narwhal. That was The Big Story. For more, including previous coverage of the Wet’suwet’en land defenders, you can head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can talk to us anytime on Twitter or just follow us for fun at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us again for fun or just to say nice things. The address is[click here!]. And you can call if you want to and leave a voicemail: 416-935-5935, you can find this podcast in every single podcast player, including a player called Fountain, which apparently now allows you to earn minuscule amounts of Bitcoin for listening to podcasts. I want no part of that, but if you do, please earn your Bitcoin listening to The Big Story.

Thank you for listening and earning Bitcoin. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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