Front Burner - Whose Police?

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

In 2017, an RCMP unit called the Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) was created to police resource-related protests in B.C. Since then, it’s been subject to lawsuits and hundreds of complaints. Critics argue that it’s a de facto private security force for resource companies. So what exactly does C-IRG do? And who does it serve? The CBC’s Steven D’Souza brings us his findings from The Fifth Estate investigation. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. We're surrounded by tactical officers with guns. They cut off the internet. They're outside the window. That's Molly Wickham, a wing chief with the Gdimdeng clan, the Wissawatan Nation, in the moments before she was arrested in November 2021.

For weeks, Molly and other Indigenous leaders had occupied a resistance camp in a key coastal gas link pipeline worksite in northwestern BC. The provincial government has said that the $14.5 billion natural gas project will help pump billions into the economy. With the occupation disrupting progress on the project, police moved in to enforce an injunction issued by the BC Supreme Court. Bali and the others occupying the camp refused to leave, saying they were asserting their hereditary land rights. They're walking through the door. They're breaking down. saying they were asserting their hereditary land rights. They're walking through the door. They're breaking down. First, they used axes to break into the building. They're breaking down the door.

They're breaking down the door. Show me your hands. Get that fucking gun off me! Get your fucking gun off me! Lower your gun! Get your fucking gun off me! Get your fucking gun off me! Lower your gun! Get your fucking gun off me! This is sovereign, but do it in men! Then, with guns trained on the occupiers, they used a chainsaw. This wasn't just any group of police officers from a local detachment.

Molly and the other people at the camp were face-to-face with a controversial new RCMP unit, the Community Industry Response Group, or CIRG. The specialized unit now faces lawsuits and hundreds of complaints for its operations in Mesotan territory and it protests against old-growth logging at Ferry Creek on Vancouver Island. and it protests against old-growth logging at Ferry Creek on Vancouver Island. And its methods have raised questions about whose interests the group is meant to protect. My colleague, Stephen D'Souza, has been looking into this with the CBC's Fifth Estate and is here with me today. Hey, Stephen, thanks so much for coming on Frontburner.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate you being here. Okay, so we're going to get to some of the accusations I mentioned in the intro in a minute. But I guess my first big question is like, what exactly is CURG? What's the Community Industry Response Group? Yeah, so it's a unit that the BCRCMP created to specifically police resource protests. And it's interesting because we've seen a lot of video of police on the front lines of these protests in British Columbia. But KERG never had any sort of branding. So they didn't have special uniforms.

I mean, they have a little deco on some of their vehicles, but to see them, you wouldn't know necessarily that it's part of the specialized unit. And it's made up of officers who volunteer from around the province. They have frontline officers, tactical officers, canine units, helicopter team, emergency response teams. It's a pretty well-resourced unit. And they're given also specialized training to deal with protests and Indigenous rights. So it's a mix of frontline and tactical officers designed specifically for resource protests. You mentioned that these are RCMP officers, but they're brought into the specialized function and they have some specialized

training. What are their tactics like? I mean, their tactics, you know, in some cases, protesters have said they're very, almost like a paramilitary force. Like the raid that you played off the top, in that case, before they went in, they actually cut off the internet to the people on site there. Their leadership structure is the kind that the RCMP uses in emergency situations. They have different sort of components. So they have liaison teams that go in at first and will talk to people. But then they also have guys who are in sort of green military looking uniforms with sniper rifles fully kitted out. And, you know, they've also been criticized for tactics like creating exclusion zones where they limit the media's access to enforcement operations. So it's a lot more. And even the RCMP has said, you know, this is not

something that Canadians may typically be used to seeing happen in Canada. So I should mention the folks in the Wissotan Territory too, they don't see themselves as protesters, right? They see themselves as asserting the rights they have to the land. So you were there in BC and Wissotan Territory reporting on this story, and you had some interactions with the security companies there. What were your experiences like? It was interesting because, yeah, we came there when the enforcement actions weren't quite as high as they had been in the past. And so Kerg was around, but cynically you could say perhaps they knew we were going to be in the area. So they were kind of keeping a little profile, but we did come in contact interestingly with some of the security companies contracted by the

resource companies. And this is a private security, apart from KERG. Apart from KERG, a private security company. And so when we entered an area in Wet'suwet'en territory where Coastal GasLink was doing pipeline work, we were immediately met by one of these private security officers and an RCMP officer, and they quickly assessed who we were. And from there, we started driving up a forest service road, which is a one lane road where you have to radio up ahead to tell trucks coming down that you're coming up and you'll move out of the way for traffic coming down the mountain. So we're, we have somebody following us now. It's a Foresight security truck. Started following us about two kilometers back and we'll

see how long they continue to stay with us. And we thought, you know, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's just stuck behind us. So we pulled off and on the radio, we said, oh, we're just taking a pee break, go on, go on by. And he comes back, take your time. And later on, when we stopped at another location, we actually circled back and talked to the person driving this truck. And sure enough, he said he was following us and pretty much everybody up and down the mountain knew who we were and where we were at all times and so it was a bit of an eerie feeling because it gave us sort of a small taste of what the Indigenous communities in this area have said they get when they're being followed or surveilled by the RCMP and

CURG or these private security companies. I have to literally go out every day and every night, chase them off my land, off my inter. It's private property. You guys have no rights to be here whatsoever. Can you kind of give me a sense of where CURG came from? I know it wasn't formed until 2017. Give me a little backstory here. Yeah, so around 2017 is when there was some growing protests against the Trans Mountain Pipeline, but there was also a big protest in the U.S. at Standing Rock in North Dakota. Over 100 Native American tribes have joined the fight against the project, saying that it threatens one tribe's water supply and its sacred land.

Drumbeats, cheers, and tears. The sound of victory for the Standing Rock Sioux and thousands of others gathered to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. This mass of humanity helped exert so much political and legal pressure, it effectively forced the pipeline to be rerouted. And that's something that the RCMP has cited in some of the documents that formed KERG as evidence that a force like this was needed, because what they saw there was Indigenous groups blockading construction, you know, occupying land, indigenous groups, locating construction, you know, occupying land and some pretty violent confrontations. And they actually quote from one of the documents saying Canadians who attended those protests talked about bringing those tactics here. And so the RCMP was seeing the example of

what was happening in Standing Rock and thinking that could be brought to Canada. And so they needed a specialized force. And that's part of the reason that how KERG was born. So KERG was the unit that was brought in for a couple of major disputes in BC in the past few years. It's been used to enforce injunctions. In the Wasowatin case, it was an injunction to stop people from getting in the way of the coastal gas link pipeline project. Indigenous leaders there and their supporters and allies had set up some camps and barricades. So can you break down for me how injunctions are used in these cases? So yeah, the injunctions are really what give Kyrgios authority in these areas.

And so essentially the companies, Coastal Gas Link in the case of Wet'suwet'en territory, in Ferry Creek, it was Teal Cedar. They go to the courts and say, look, we're trying to get this work done. The protests are getting in our way. Can you put an injunction against these protests? And some research has shown that about 75, 76% of the time, corporations are successful in getting these injunctions. And so what happens is the injunction blocks the protests, for example, in Wet'suwet'en from blocking the roads. What's supposed to happen is that the companies and the other side are supposed to go back

to court to resolve whatever issues. And the injunction is only meant to be temporary. But what happens in practice, ultimately, is that the injunction stays until work is done, and then they'll ask for a new injunction or a new temporary injunction. And so in practice, it ends up that the injunctions just last until the work is done. So the company or corporation will apply for an injunction. The injunction gets—there's an injunction invoked. And then when does this, when does CURG get pulled in?

And what are the ground rules there for enforcing the injunctions? So CURG is kind of pulled in right away. That's when the RCMP determines how it wants to enforce. And so essentially when a court issues an order for the RCMP to enforce the injunction, that's pretty much what the RCMP is given. So how they actually enforce it, they're kind of given really, really wide discretion. And that's where the controversy really comes in because a lot of the people we talk to, you know, in the indigenous communities, the activists say that the real issue is how the

RCMP enforces the injunction. So you see sometimes what happened in Ferry Creek where things were, you know, quite violent, it seemed, in terms of how the RCMP enforced the injunction. And then on the other side, you see the Ottawa convoy protests, you know, Cootes, Alberta as well. After days of warning that this was coming, police moved in. Following three weeks of inaction and criticism, police started to reclaim the heart of the capital. There you saw the RCMP sort of take more of a hands-off approach to enforcing the injunction. And so one expert we spoke with, Sherry Pasternak at Toronto Metropolitan University, really

pointed to that as a key difference between the discretion that the RCMP uses when they're enforcing these injunctions. So let's talk about some of the main allegations against Kirk. One of the big ones is that it's not representative of community interests. It's more cozy with industry. So there's more I than C, so to speak, in KERG. Private mercenaries for industry. That's what they are to me. That's what we've experienced. The KERG is there to protect the private property interests of corporations, full stop.

What did your investigation uncover about the relationship with KERG and companies like Coastal GasLink? overseas where the pipeline will feed into, they both wrote letters to the RCMP brass saying that blockaders, indigenous communities had occupied sites that they wanted to drill in and that the RCMP needed to do something and that they were losing money and that if the RCMP didn't do anything, the company would go to the court and ask the RCMP, enforce the RCMP to act. The RCMP had set up until that point, there was no threat to public safety, so they didn't need to move in. And this is the site, Coyote Camp, where Indigenous leaders like Molly Wickham, known as Slato, had been on site there. And so they had occupied the site for weeks and

weeks. And what we found was that after these letters were sent to the RCMP about two weeks later is when the RCMP actually moved in. You put some questions to the former head of KERG. What did he have to say about that? Yeah, we talked to John Brewer, who's now an assistant commissioner with the RCMP in BC. He was a commander with KERG for many years and was there at its formation. One of the accusations against KERG and the allegations is that it's essentially an arm of private industry. What do you say to that?

Yeah, that's absolutely not true. Remember, there's an injunction in place granted by the Supreme Court of British Columbia. We do not just go ad hoc. And that, of course, yes, they have to talk to the companies because they need to know where enforcement is necessary because they need to know where the workers need to get to. And so that's just part of what their job is.

Quite often, we're called to the scene by industry, whether it's their security teams or their workers. You know, we are impartial on this. If you're breaching the injunction, we will deal with it. If you're breaking the law, whether it's industry or protesters. He says they also talk to the protesters. And he says that at some points, both sides are equally mad at them, so they must be doing something right. A simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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protesters and Kerg and really generated a lot of national headlines. And protesters alleged police used excessive force during arrests and that they would hold them in vans for hours during incredibly hot temperatures, that police would throw away personal property. They alleged that they were denied access to lawyers after arrests, and that in some cases, people who were arrested would be driven a few hours away to other locations just to make it harder.

The people would allege just to make it harder for them to return. There's something in the piece too that the Kerg officers are using something called pain compliance. What can you tell me about that? Yeah, so some protesters talked about and indigenous activists talked about their hands being bent or their arms being bent in unnatural directions. you know, their hands being bent or their arms being bent in unnatural directions. And the RCMP actually readily admitted that they do use pain compliance techniques in order to affect arrests. That's just something that they do, but it's necessary for crowd control. And there's an infamous video of an officer actually ripping somebody's mask off, because this took place a couple of years ago during the pandemic,

ripping the mask off and then in this crowd of activists called a blob where everyone's kind of linked to arms, they start sort of pepper spraying people point blank. And again, you know, we asked John Brewer about this and he said this was necessary for crowd control. This was necessary that arrests don't always look pretty, but that's what they needed to do. There was also an incident against CGL workers in Wet'suwet'en in February 2022, where a large group attacked the workers with axes and caused a lot of damage. The company estimates it was in the millions of dollars. No arrests were made in that case, but it's an example, Brewer says, of the threats that his officers are facing all the time.

And so, you know, I think he's willing to give his officers a bit of leeway because they are operating in difficult circumstances. There's also a woman you interviewed, a protester named Raven, and I think she had been arrested four times. She's an Anishinaabe woman from Quebec. She had some pretty alarming allegations about her arrest experience. Yeah, she's one of the more outspoken activists and Indigenous leaders in Ferry Creek. And she says that often she would have multiple officers

taking her down. She talks about being thrown to the ground or getting picked up and then thrown back down to the ground. And that police would create these arbitrary exclusion zones and then suddenly move in and arrest people quite violently who were caught inside these exclusion zones. I mean, they pretty much pulled my shirt up at this point. My pants were pretty much taken down.

So, like, I was pretty much exposed. They were also holding me down by my breast. She also alleges that police conducted cavity searches on her male officers would do this and that female officers weren't present and that oftentimes when the media was pushed back, when others were pushed back, that's when she alleges that Kirk officers would act out.

And did you get a response from the RCMP about that allegation? Yeah, we asked the RCMP about those allegations and John Brewer, you know, denied them, said that things like that have never happened, that they have body camera footage to back that up and that there was always female officers present when women are arrested. And he said, you know, the idea that Indigenous women are being strip searched or cavity searched by male officers, he said, is ridiculous and just hasn't happened. It's one of their stated tactics of the protesters is to make as many complaints, public complaints.

So you're saying these women who allege these kinds of cavity searches, this is a tactic on their part? Yeah, I am. This has never happened. I want to turn back to the Wet'suwet'en land issue. Hereditary chiefs claim title to their ancestral lands there. So I'm curious what having these guys coming in and basically a militarized police force coming in to enforce an injunction in their community, what does it do to that community? What kind of issues does it raise? You know, we heard a lot of stories from Indigenous leaders like Molly Wickham from Chief Wass, who's a hereditary chief there, saying that, you know, to them, they see this as a continuation of the RCMP's role going all the way back to colonialism. And when the RCMP was formed in terms of, you know, rounding up Indigenous people and clearing the land, and they see that as just sort of a continuation of that historical role. And, you know, the issue there is that the Wet'suwet'en community see that as unceded territory. And they point to a 1997 Supreme Court decision,

which essentially pointed out that Indigenous title was never extinguished by the province. It opened the door, it created a legal test for Indigenous communities to prove that title in Canadian courts. The problem is after that 1997 Supreme Court ruling, there was never a follow-up in the courts. It was handled through various other processes and there was never a resolution. So what ended up happening is you have this gray area where you have the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs and leaders saying, this is our ancestral territory. We should decide what happens here. And then you have the RCMP and Kerg showing up saying, we have an injunction handed down to us from the BC Supreme Court that says we have to enforce the law here. And this is Crownland.

Every time I showed them my documents, they would not listen. It's not your property. It is so. It's right here. It's Crownland, miss. Who the hell told you it's Crownland? Where the hell did you get that idea from? This is Cassia territory, my house. You know, Molly Wickham and others have described this confrontation between colonial law and Wet'suwet'en law, and that essentially you have a pair of military forces, they describe it, trying to deal with these very complicated land rights issues.

This is a clash between Indigenous law and colonial law. In these cases, we're saying colonial law doesn't have jurisdiction, but it's also unjust, and the police are being used to enforce this unjust law. You know, I always tell people, these need to be resolved by governments, not the police. We are not resolving, you know, 150 years of conflict staring down the barrel of a gun. And this, of course, this is funded by taxpayers. I'm curious what this kind of, these kind of operations cost. I mean, there's a lot of specialized training, a lot of specialized gear. Yeah, it's not cheap.

In Wet'suwet'en in 2019, when, when enforcement was really quite high at that point, the KERG operations cost about $10 million. In Ferry Creek, it jumped to $18 million. And that's everything from, you know, transportation, communications, the staffing. Because remember, you're bringing people from all over the province, you have to house them.

And a lot of these operations take place in very remote parts of the province. And so since 2017, they've spent about $50 million on KERG operations. And some folks in BC have pointed out this is when there's a lot of other things happening, like flooding and other stuff happening, yet there's a lot of money going towards this specific unit. So KERG is facing lawsuits and complaints from some of the protesters at Ferry Creek and also people on Wet'suwet'en territory. What did you find out about how those are being dealt with? Yeah, so the complaints from Ferry Creek and Wet'suwet'en, there was 560 complaints filed against KERG from those two sites. And they were filed with an independent oversight agency called the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP.

Big mouthful. We'll call them the CRCC. And so they're the independent body charged with oversight. But what a lot of people don't realize, and this kind of touches on a longstanding issue of RCMP oversight, is that even though the complaints go to the CRCC, it's actually the RCMP that gets the first crack at investigating these complaints. So if it's something, you know, about serious harm, or somebody may have been seriously injured, that will go to an outside provincial body like the SIU in Ontario or the IIO in BC. But for things like conduct violations, the RCMP gets to decide who investigates that first. And so we basically crunched the numbers

from the CRC as to how many complaints have been looked at so far and what the results have been. And there were a lot of complaints for things like improper attitude, improper use of force, neglect of duty. And when we looked at Ferry Creek, so far the RCMP has rejected 86% of the allegations against it. And do you have insight into why? So we know that from the RCMP that they did assign an investigator who was independent from the people involved. There are some lawsuits and civil actions taking place, but the RCMP did tell us that no officer has faced a code of conduct hearing as a result of any of the actions we've seen from Kerg over the last few years. And it's interesting too, in your piece, you point out it's not just the protesters who bring

up this complaint. There was a 13-year veteran of the RCMP who was originally part of the Kerg unit and then walked away. So why did an officer leave? He said that the behavior he saw on the ground was simply not something that he was used to from his own detachment. So he pointed to examples of officers smashing windows of cars when they were trying to clear them, things he wouldn't see normally, people throwing out or confiscating property without proper procedure. He also talked about the thin blue line patch, which he's saying, you know, officers, a lot of times activists were complaining officers didn't have their name tags on. And that officers were in fact, in one case, this officer says,

were told to wear the thin blue line patches because it pissed off the hippies, which is what he described as officers describing the activists. So it was interesting that, you know, they were examples of situations where he felt uncomfortable enough that he had to step aside from this unit and even wrote to the RCMP itself saying, I'm happy with some of the work I've done, but I can't be a part of this. So what did the RCMP say about that officer's concerns? So we did ask John Brewer about this specifically and put those concerns to him. He says they talked to the officer and that he wasn't forthcoming with more evidence to back up his allegations. So we specifically

investigated this. We met with that officer, show us the evidence, talk to us, give a statement, and nothing was forthcoming. You got people screaming at you, people throwing things at you, people resisting you. You're outnumbered 90% of the time. That's not something that every person can do, let alone every police officer. We have people... And, you know, I put it to him that, you know, it's not always easy for RCMP officers to speak out against their own.

The RCMP doesn't have a great history with whistleblowers, but what Brewer said is that this officer was given a chance to make these claims and to back it up with evidence, and he didn't. So just to wrap it up, Stephen, these incidents that we've been talking about took place a couple of years ago and then there's been this wave of complaints and lawsuits that we've been talking about. Has that affected the Kerg's operations right now? Well, they're still on the ground in BC, even though the CGL pipeline work is pretty much finished. Logging in Ferry Creek has been put on hold until 2025, but they're still on the ground. And in fact, earlier this spring, the BC

government announced stable funding for KERG for the next three years. Some of the folks you talked to want to see disbanded. What are their concerns if these complaints and the legal concerns don't get addressed? Yeah, the CRCC is doing a review of KERG, its processes, its training and policies. We're not sure when that's going to wrap up,

but a lot of people don't have a lot of optimism that that's going to affect any change. And in fact, they're worried that the RCMP will see this as a success, as a successful policing model, and it could get exported to other conflicts around the country. Right. Stephen, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. My pleasure, Damon. Thank you. All right. You can watch the Fifth Estate's full documentary, Who's Police, on YouTube. It's out now. That's all for today. I'm Damon Fairless.

Thanks so much for listening to Front Burner. I'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.