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 protest camp against the Coast GasLink pipeline in northwestern B.C. was unlawful.
Police and the B.C. and Canadian governments say in their response to the lawsuit that the fact Bracken was on assignment at the time did not exempt her from obeying the terms of an injunction against the protest.
The Narwhal’s acting editor-in-chief Carol Linnitt says in a statement that injunction zones allow the RCMP alone to “determine what journalism is, who performs it, where and how.”
She says in the statement that she read outside the B.C Supreme Court in Vancouver before the start of the civil trial that freedom of press “will utterly wither” under such conditions.
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.
Charges against Bracken were eventually dropped.
The Canadian Association of Journalists says 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 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.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 12, 2026.
The Canadian Press
