Journalists amplify protest movements; police silence their stories. A look inside the fight for press freedom
If Brandi Morin had to place a bet on where she might get arrested, her home Treaty Six territories in Edmonton, Alberta, wouldn’t even make her shortlist. The moment the Indigenous journalist later described as “one of the darkest chapters” of her career began while Morin was covering an Indigenous-led homeless encampment on a cold, harsh winter night.
Morin had been conducting on-the-ground interviews as part of her coverage of the encampment, one of at least eight targeted for demolition. Since November 2023, the Edmonton municipal police have carried out frequent, often disruptive encampment sweeps. Around 2,500 unhoused people live in the city of Edmonton, 54 percent of whom were Indigenous in 2022, according to York University’s Homeless Hub. The tension was high. Morin heard a young woman yell at the police, “This is Treaty 6 Territory! You are trespassing on Indigenous land—fuck you!”
On January 10, 2024, while Morin was speaking with people who were experiencing possible eviction, the police told her to leave. She refused, so they handcuffed her and escorted her to the back of a police van, preventing her from covering the story further.
Morin was deposited in a jail cell with a “metal toilet, sink, and a concrete slab against the wall” for five hours. She was let out briefly to make phone calls to ensure her child was cared for and to contact her editor at Ricochet to arrange for a lawyer. Upon release, she was charged with obstruction and, after being photographed and fingerprinted, was given a court summons for February 1. After covering protests across Canada, South America, and the United States for 14 years, she couldn’t fathom her arrest. “I am a mother, I have a young six-year-old here at home with me,” she reflects. At the time, “I wondered if I would continue doing the work that I do because of the amount of stress that it caused.”
Morin was arrested within a media exclusion zone, which journalists have had difficulties accessing over the past few years. The Canada Press Freedom Project (CPFP) believes that reporting in Indigenous communities is essential to reconciliation within Canada’s justice system. Yet, according to its history of media exclusion zones, CPFP says those “decisions have not been of use on the ground at protests, and it has proven challenging to effect any meaningful change.”
The risk of arrest that journalists face, especially when covering Indigenous people who are defending their land, can be a deterrent to exposing police brutality and its role in perpetuating colonial acts of violence. Morin admits the arrest changed her for the worse. “I honestly went into a very dark place emotionally and mentally,” she says, describing how she became depressed and questioned her line of work. “Even though I cover these things, and I understood that it was a reality, you don’t understand the psychological impacts of it until you experience it.”
Given the current tension and violent history, Morin’s case is now just one of many between journalists at protests and Canadian law enforcement. Marginalized journalists, in particular, are at greater risk of experiencing police violence and harassment—an unsettling trend bonding the experiences of those on the frontlines.
A New, Darker Chapter
Morin’s arrest was only the latest in a long history of police actions used against Indigenous journalists and communities. Land defenders in Canada have consistently faced arrest and disposition, with the media “swept up in acts of force” as a result of “finally showing up.” Overall, the CPFP states that media exclusion zones have barred journalists from reporting on at least two key events—one in April 2023, when Vancouver police set up a media exclusion zone during the Downtown Eastside decampment.
In its 2023 report, CPFP documented 17 denials of access, nearly three times as many as in 2022, when there were six. Police denied access to media workers in eight out of 17 cases, with five where police used or threatened to use physical force. Police threatened media workers with arrest in four cases—a stark difference from 2021, when there were 24 cases of denied access, 17 of which occurred during the Fairy Creek land defence protests to halt old-growth logging on Vancouver Island.
J-Source, a publication jointly led by Toronto Metropolitan University and Carleton University, launched CPFP in 2022 to assess infringements on press freedoms. The idea was to create a resource to ensure that the protections laid out under Section 2b of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are upheld. CPFP says these freedoms are being challenged in an age of “technological and financial disruption” that journalists face within the industry. “We’ve seen the persistent denial of legal frameworks by police and security forces around the country,” says Steph Wechsler, managing editor of J-Source and CPFP, “who are frequently—improperly in many cases—enforcing injunctions.”
Some provincial high courts have already denounced media exclusion zones. In 2019, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Court of Appeal made a decision regarding a journalist accused of trespassing in violation of an injunction while covering a blockade at a power plant. Judges wrote that “[t]he potential ‘chilling effect’ is real and significant and should be avoided if at all possible.”
“The law is clear,” Ethan Cox, editor of Ricochet Media, told reporters. “High courts in [Newfoundland and Labrador] and even the RCMP’s own oversight body have all found that broad exclusion zones and other police efforts to prevent journalists from reporting on their actions are unlawful. The press must have access to report on the actions of police.”
Other media watchdog groups agreed. “It is bad enough that police arrested a journalist for doing her job,” Clayton Weimer, executive director for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) USA, wrote in a statement. “…but it is outrageous that prosecutors would even consider pursuing the charges against Brandi Morin. These tactics are meant to intimidate independent reporters, and this case is tantamount to criminalizing journalism.”
Arrests of journalists in Canada are rare, yet there is evidence that police arrest reporters covering police actions and demonstrations as a tactic to remove them from the scene, according to RSF. When it comes to journalists covering Indigenous issues, arrests are common, despite Canadian court rulings that police must allow media access to its enforcement activities. “It was stressful,” says Morin. “I didn’t know if they were going to move forward in the court process.”
Weimer says the case would set “a dangerous precedent” for Canada, which “otherwise ranks high globally”—fifteenth out of 180 countries in 2023 on the RSF World Press Freedom Index. Even so, Morin’s case is now just one of many between journalists at protests and Canadian law enforcement. These tactics are being employed beyond Indigenous protests, often aimed at photojournalists whose work requires them to report from the front lines.
Sight Lines
On a crisp September evening in 2024, Toronto-based freelance photographer Jess Baumung happened upon a protest while biking home in downtown Toronto. He shakily whipped out his iPhone and DSLR camera and took footage of police abusing and harming Palestinian activists. Baumung, who sometimes shoots punk shows, decided to stick around, if only to capture what was happening. “I felt like without proper documentation of that kind of stuff, the police can really just say whatever they want,” he says, “and whatever news happens to pick up, that story is just going to go with whatever public statement they make.”
He recalls the police shouting, “Get off the sidewalk!” It was as though the police were attempting to push peaceful protestors on an “active roadway,” he says—but then protestors resisted. “The police immediately escalated—started shoving people and pepper spraying, and at one point I saw the guy hitting somebody.”
Baumung posted the photographs on Instagram afterwards. The images are striking: a woman wearing a keffiyeh head scarf yelps as she is elbowed in the face by a police officer. Another shows a protester being shoved. In a third photo, a woman pours water into the eyes of a man who has been pepper sprayed. As a young, half-Palestinian, emerging photojournalist myself, the pictures were not encouraging.
“Ian Willms knew he was going to be arrested, but the symbolism was more powerful than getting the photos”
Nick Lachance
Jesse Winter, cofounder of the United Photojournalists of Canada (UPoC), says he sees police act this way frequently. “Any time there is a protest or land defence movement taking place,” he says, one of the first things they do on the scene is try to control the media. A Vancouver-based freelance photojournalist, Winter says UPoC was born out of concern for freelance photojournalists “not being heard” and needing to “band together.” The hope was to fill a gap in Canadian newsrooms that do not adequately support freelance photojournalists amid declining freelance rates and increasing precarity. “Police are not just threatening arrest, they actually are arresting people with more freedom, and with a growing unaccountability,” Winter says. “Police are removing their names, badge numbers,” in reference to his time covering CRAB Park’s encampment in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, for Maclean’s.
Jumping Their Fence
It’s a story familiar to Nick Lachance and Ian Willms. Lachance, a Toronto Star 2023–24 photo intern and freelance photojournalist, was working with Now Magazine when he photographed 2021 police raids on homeless encampments in Toronto. “I have certainly been there for the police being violent,” says Lachance. “During COVID, I covered a lot of the encampment clearings.”
At one such clearing, Lachance was with his colleague, Ian Willms, another photojournalist and a contributor to The New York Times. Willms deduced that the police had cordoned off an area. “Their exclusion zone,” says Lachance, “the cops and the RCMP’s new favourite friggin’ thing.” Willms says no one was allowed within the fence. They were “too far away from the tents to properly observe and document the process of removing tents, belongings, and potentially anyone who was inside,” he says. “We didn’t know if there were people inside the tents or not because we couldn’t get close.”
Willms made numerous attempts to gain access by communicating with the police. “I identified myself, I showed my ID,” he says. “I was either told ‘no’ without further explanation, or I was ignored. They would turn their backs on me and pretend I wasn’t there.”
Without knowledge of a court injunction, and the lack of “No Trespassing” signs on the fence, Willms decided the fence had no legal standing and hopped it. “I think he knew he was going to be arrested,” says Lachance, “but the symbolism of that is more powerful than him getting the photos.”
Immediately after landing in the exclusion zone, Willms was put in handcuffs. He was told he was being charged with mischief, obstruction, and trespassing. “It’s scary because those charges could carry jail time,” he says, “not to mention it screws up your ability to travel and do your job in the future.”
Right away, a cop shoved Lachance as he photographed Willms’s arrest. Willms says the situation escalated immediately. “Out of nowhere, didn’t even see the dude come, and I had a camera to my face,” says Lachance. “All of a sudden, I’m getting shoved by this bike cop, which created another arbitrary line that I was supposed to be behind I wasn’t aware of.”
The police took Willms’s camera equipment, placed him in a van, and drove him around for an hour or two until they finally stopped at the police station in the Davenport neighbourhood. “When they let me go, they said I was being given an unconditional discharge, which basically means you’re free to go,” he says. “But then they also said, if you go back to the park, you will be arrested and you will be charged—which is not appropriate. You can’t give somebody an unconditional discharge and then give them conditions.”
Winter compares Willms’s experience to his own while covering Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods encampment and the clearing of Vancouver’s CRAB Park encampment. “It was the same kind of strategy of obfuscation, of fettering our access, and putting up these exclusion zones”—areas, Winter says, which are made to be “basically devoid of press freedom.” It’s especially concerning, he continues, when journalists are not allowed to be present when police adopt violent tactics to combat protestors. “Even though journalists were there,” he says, “we couldn’t see what was happening.”
Separating Fact from Fiction
“I don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of arrests,” says award-winning photojournalist Amber Bracken. “I don’t think that’s actually the problem. The arrest is the worst-case scenario of something that happens a lot more frequently, which is repression, exclusion, and general interference with the role of reporters.”
Bracken and her colleague, Michael Toledano, were arrested and detained in 2021 while reporting a police raid. The raid targeted a land defenders’ blockade against the creation of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Wet’suwet’en First Nation territory in British Columbia’s central interior. Years later, the RCMP “doubled down” on their arrest: RCMP lawyers argued in an October 2023 court filing—without providing evidence—that Bracken “was not engaged in apparent good faith news-gathering activities.” Instead, it claimed Bracken was “aiding or abetting” protestors targeted during the raid. “I should never have been arrested or charged, let alone detained, in the first place,” Bracken told The Narwhal. “I can’t get those days of my life and work back. Nothing in these proceedings provides any feedback to RCMP for their gross interference with journalists, so what’s stopping police from just doing it again?”
“It’s important for journalists to be present at protests,” Bracken continues. “It’s a form of democracy, right? When you feel strongly enough about something, you need to make your voice heard, you get out on the street. That in itself is worthy of note and recording.”
Bracken says that reporters’ coverage of protests separates fact from fiction for the public. “I wouldn’t necessarily just take a politician’s word for it for reporting a story at Parliament Hill,” says Bracken. “We’re going to check those sources. We’re going to check those facts. We’re going to dig into it. If we only have the police’s account of how things occurred, we’re at such a disadvantage in getting a real story.”
“And it’s not just police,” Bracken says about the role of journalism in spaces of protest. “Protesters and other entities can misrepresent the truth. If we want a democratic society, we should have unattached observers.”
Morin echoes Bracken’s frustration with the gap in the general public’s understanding of news coverage, specifically as it relates to Indigenous stories. “There have been times when, mainly, members of the public have accused me of being an activist.” She criticizes an understanding of bias that is often levied against her as an Indigenous journalist covering Indigenous issues. “I’ve even had a colleague years ago say that I shouldn’t be covering Indigenous stories because I’m Indigenous,” Morin says. “On the other hand, I questioned why they would be covering mainstream stories in a predominantly white community if they were white.”
Laura Proctor, a Toronto-based freelance photojournalist for publications including The Globe and Mail, agrees. “The general public doesn’t have a great understanding of what freedom of the press actually entails,” she says, especially when it comes to understanding the intricacies of media law. “A big aspect is that photojournalists and reporters are supposed to have more access than the public to whatever is happening to a situation.” Giving police the power to decide when they can put up fences and exclude journalists, she says, restricts this freedom of the press. “It’s restricting people’s ability to capture what is happening properly and honestly.”
A Liberated Press
Journalism is at risk when journalists are blocked from protests, and in some ways, doubly so when Indigenous reporters and coverage of Indigenous land defence become targeted by law enforcement. But Morin came out of the ordeal with her autonomy and dedication intact. “I’ve invested years of myself and my heart into it,” she says. “The thought of quitting this work was just heart-wrenching for me.”
In a show of support for Morin following her arrest, eight prominent press freedom groups held a press conference in solidarity in late January 2024. Morin thanks her Ricochet editor, Ethan Cox, for sticking by her side. “I’m a freelancer. They didn’t necessarily have to stand beside me, but they did, rallying national and international press organizations, and getting me a pro bono lawyer.”
After her release, Morin was scheduled to return to court on March 1, 2024, but it never happened. That morning, her lawyer texted her to say the charges had been dropped. Apparently, the authorities decided that she should never have been charged. “Whatever I had been holding onto regarding the heaviness of the situation was released that moment,” says Morin. “It wasn’t too long after that that I regained my footing and determination, the confidence that I could go back into situations with conflict where police are involved. I reminded myself of the importance of it and my rights. I felt empowered.”
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CASE STUDY
The Oka Crisis—And why protests continue to dominate Indigenous coverage
Canadian media opened their eyes to Indigenous stories with the iconic photograph at the Kanesatake Reserve on September 1, 1990. It shows Canadian soldier, Patrick Cloutier, and Brad Larocque, an Anishinaabe university student from Saskatchewan, during the Oka, Quebec, face-off. “The tipping point had been reached in Canada’s press—if not government conduct—where the colonial imagination was being shoved aside by something more befitting a late-twentieth-century liberal democracy that prided itself on its commitment to multiculturalism and racial tolerance,” wrote Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson in Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Newspapers.
In the summer of 1990, west of Montreal, members of the Mohawk nation barricaded access to acres of land that non-Indigenous residents of Oka had sought for a golf course expansion. The Mohawks had claimed the land as their rightful sacred burial ground. Meanwhile, Oka sought an injunction granted by the court, requiring their dismantling. In response to the Mohawks’ refusal, Quebec’s provincial police launched a surprise attack on July 11, 1990. A 78-day standoff proceeded, and, eventually, in late August, 2,500 members of the Canadian Forces were unleashed in place of police.
The court’s ruling against the Mohawks is far from isolated. A 2019 study of more than 100 cases of injunctions involving First Nations found that between 1958 and 2019, only 18.5 percent of injunctions for First Nations peoples were successful. Meanwhile, injunctions filed against First Nations groups were more likely to be approved by courts. “It is more often the case that injunctions are used against First Nations to circumvent their ability to assert Aboriginal rights, title, and treaty rights in relation to Crown and corporate development and projects,” say the study’s authors. About half of the disputes historically filed by First Nation groups have been over blockades.
Direct actions such as blockades, protests, and land defence tend to receive more coverage because, as Anishinaabe journalist Duncan McCue writes, “protests…meet the test of newsworthiness,” punched up by racism. Canadian media perpetuates colonial perceptions of Indigenous communities as being “violent,” “uncivilized,” and a “threat to progress.”
As Anderson and Robertson note, news reports on the Oka Crisis include harsh criticism of the governments in Ottawa and Quebec City—and sometimes Oka—yet defended Canadian colonialism. Other reports praised the Canadian military for essentially “sanctioning colonial-style behaviour (despite the fact that the Canadian military was used against domestic civilian protestors) without necessarily directly attacking Natives,” write Anderson and Robertson.
The results of the Oka Crisis remain unclear. Development stopped but the Mohawks did not receive their land back. As Seeing Red points out, “Ultimately the media attention and consequent political pressure bore some fruit, leading the federal government to amend and improve its slow-moving land-reform efforts.” —Reema Najjar
About the author
Reema Najjar is a final-year undergraduate journalism student at Toronto Metropolitan University. She has a niche within arts and culture journalism, as she enjoys capturing local concerts, runways, and event photography. As a queer Palestinian photojournalist, she’s interested in covering stories that centre around communities with minimal mainstream media representation. When she’s not on the hunt for her next shoot, she could be found lounging with her cat Charlie or seen frantically researching her next special interest.
