Media harder to identify, RCMP officer tells hearing over photojournalist’s lawsuit

VANCOUVER – The RCMP officer in charge of enforcing a court injunction in a British Columbia pipeline dispute where a photojournalist was arrested in 2021 testified Wednesday that he welcomes media coverage of such operations.

“In every one of my commands, the media is mentioned as being given as much access as reasonably possible,” Asst. Commissioner John Brewer told a B.C. Supreme Court hearing over the lawsuit filed by photojournalist Amber Bracken.

“It’s the reasonableness that I think may be an issue with both sides,” he added.

Brewer said it’s not up to police to “arbitrate who’s media and who’s not,” provided they’re not interfering with police work or “overtly complicit” with protesters.

But he said inconsistency in media behaviour can lead to “misunderstandings” on both sides.

Bracken and news organization The Narwhal are seeking a declaration that her November 2021 arrest at a protest over the Coastal GasLink pipeline was unlawful.

Lawyer Sean Hern, who is representing Bracken and The Narwhal, told the court at the start of the trial that his client was carrying multiple cameras, press identification and a letter from the publication when she was arrested.

Brewer said he’s “never questioned someone’s media credentials,” but it has become more difficult to identify media covering police operations.

“When I first started policing — I joke a bit, your honour — every media person had a fedora and a press tag sticking out of it, you knew who they were. I don’t know anymore. And that leads to issues,” Brewer told the hearing in Vancouver.

“I’m not trying to be glib with the court on that. It’s hard,” he added. “A couple times we’ve asked media, can you identify yourself, even when you’re going into a dynamic situation, would you put a piece of coloured tape around your arm and we’ll give it to you? ‘No we’re not doing that.'”

Questioned by a lawyer for the Attorney General of Canada, Brewer “categorically” denied the Mounties have tried to suppress media coverage through threats of arrest or the use of so-called exclusion zones during enforcement operations.

The RCMP response to the lawsuit said Bracken was not exempt from complying with the injunction and claimed her actions “went beyond her role as a journalist.”

Bracken was held in detention for three days after her arrest and initially charged with civil contempt of court, but the case was later dropped.

In a separate trial of protesters last year, the court heard that a recording device seized from Bracken at the time of her arrest continued to capture police conversations.

A judge found officers whose voices were captured on the recording made “grossly offensive, racist and dehumanizing” remarks about Indigenous women who were arrested at the protest, and he reduced the protesters’ sentences as a remedy. 

Bracken, whose work has been published by news organizations including The Canadian Press, has said the civil lawsuit concerns the media as a whole.

The Narwhal’s acting editor-in-chief, Carol Linnitt, said in a statement before the trial started 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.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 4, 2026.