RCMP was ‘unreasonable’ when setting up exclusion zones around Fairy Creek protest

A Mountie deployed to enforce an injunction obtained by timber firm Teal-Jones at Fairy Creek in 2021. Photo: submitted/file

APTN News: The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP (CRCC) says that the RCMP was unreasonable in setting up broad exclusion zones and checkpoints while enforcing a civil injunction covering the Fairy Creek area in British Columbia, home to old growth forests and a protest led by people trying to save them.

“In its review, the CRCC found that the broad exclusion zones and checkpoints used by members of the RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) were unreasonable,” said the report released on Wednesday. “The review determined that the RCMP’s demand to search the complainant at a checkpoint on a public road was unfounded, and his arrest, after refusing to agree to the search, was groundless.”

C-IRG is a low-profile RCMP group tasked with responding to protests and other public order events about resource based industrial projects like logging and pipeline construction.

The review of a complaint against C-IRG was launched two years ago after the RCMP’s initial investigation concluded that the RCMP members were acting within their legal authority when they blocked a hiker’s way and demanded to search the man who they stopped along a service road in the Fairy Creek area.

The report released Wednesday summarized the incident.

In September 2021, a man was hiking along a forest service road in the Fairy Creek area with a group of friends. They came up to an RCMP access control point, where two RCMP members told the group that they had to submit to searches of their backpacks and provide identification before they could go any further.

The man said that this violated his rights against unreasonable search and seizure under section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter).

The man said that the British Columbia Supreme Court had recently declared the RCMP’s use of exclusion zones for enforcing the injunction to be unlawful. He also said that he had the right to use a public road, and he refused to leave when the RCMP members ordered him to do so. The RCMP members arrested the man and one of his friends for the criminal offence of obstructing a peace officer in the execution of their duty and transported him out of the area for processing.

The man complained that he had been blocked from hiking along a public road even though the courts had declared the RCMP exclusion zones and access control points to be unlawful.

He also complained that the RCMP members had made an unreasonable search demand when they wanted to see his identification and search his backpack without grounds. The man was concerned that this violated his Charter rights. Additionally, the RCMP members had removed their name tags from their uniforms, and one of the RCMP members wore a “Thin Blue Line” patch (an image of the Canadian flag in black and crossed with a blue line to represent the police) on his uniform. The man believed that these actions violated RCMP policy.

In its final report on the public complaint, the CRCC determined the RCMP’s demand to search the complainant at a checkpoint on a public road was unfounded, and his arrest, after refusing to agree to the search, was groundless.

According to the CRCC, the RCMP Commissioner also agreed with most of the findings and recommendations in the review and committed to develop a national policy on policing civil injunctions that is consistent with recent court rulings on police powers and civil liberties during public order events.

The CRCC review also concluded that the practice of searching people who seek to cross into what is an unreasonable exclusion zone violates their rights and freedoms; it was unreasonable for RCMP members at the protest sites to remove their name tags, without any other effective way to identify them; and an RCMP member who wore the unauthorized “Thin Blue Line” patch on his uniform acted “unreasonably and broke policy.”

“Policing is inherently a visible job with a lot of public interaction,” the CRCC review said, “This includes being in the public eye and facing public scrutiny and criticism, as well as being subject to oversight processes. When police officers remove all identifying information from their uniforms, they have been permitted to cloak themselves in anonymity. This harms accountability and eats away at the public’s trust in the police, who might seem like faceless monoliths in the eyes of protesters and observers.

“The Commission found that it was unreasonable for RCMP command teams to permit RCMP members conducting enforcement in the Fairy Creek injunction area to remove their name tags without an alternate way to distinguish and identify them visually.”

The CRCC is also completing a separate systemic investigation of the activities and operations of the C-IRG in British Columbia.

APTN reported on the C-IRG in 2021, after incidents in B.C. at various protests. The C-IRG was not only at Fairy Creek, but also at the incursion onto Wet’suwet’en territory where Canada-Gas Link was building a pipeline to transport fracked natural gas from northeastern B.C. to Kitimat on the coast.

The Fairy Creek Injunction was granted to Teal Cedar in 2021, in response to the blockade by Indigenous protesters and others trying to prevent the company from logging old-growth trees. The injunction expired in September 2023.