Good morning.

A B.C. civil court judge is hearing arguments this week that will require her to consider the boundaries of freedom of the press and who qualifies to claim it.

Amber Bracken is an award-winning photojournalist whose images have appeared in The Globe and Mail and other national and international publications. She won the 2022 World Press Photo of the Year for an image she took of a memorial on Tk’emlups te Secwepemc land just outside Kamloops, B.C.

This week, she and B.C.-based outlet The Narwhal are in court as a judge hears their lawsuit against the RCMP and the governments of B.C. and Canada. Bracken and The Narwhal are seeking a declaration that her detention at a remote protest camp against the Coastal GasLink pipeline violated her and her employer’s constitutional rights to freedom of the press.

They are seeking general, aggravated, special and punitive damages.

Bracken was among 15 people arrested in November, 2021 during an RCMP operation to remove protesters blocking access to the Coastal GasLink construction site in northern British Columbia.

She and Michael Toledano, a documentary filmmaker, were reporting amid rising tensions near Houston, B.C., at the Gidimt’en camp in Wet’suwet’en territory. Both were taken into custody, along with other protesters. The arrests happened on a Friday and Bracken spent the weekend in jail.

The Coastal GasLink pipeline project was strongly opposed by hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en, although five elected band councils belonging to the Wet’suwet’en supported the project.

The 670-kilometre pipeline transports natural gas from northeastern B.C. to a liquid natural gas facility in Kitimat.

Indigenous protesters had been blocking access for nearly a week to a forest service road used by more than 500 workers. Bracken and Toledano were arrested as the RCMP moved in to enforce an injunction and clear the site.

Sean Hern, lead counsel for Bracken and The Narwhal, said Monday in his opening statement in court that denying journalists access can have a chilling effect and weakens democracy.

Without the presence of people such as Bracken, he said, arrests at protests would be hidden and the public would be left to piece together what happened from press releases.

“There would have been a total absence of reliable, impartial and timely information available to the public, and democracy requires more,” Hern said.

“Reliable information gathered and transmitted to the public by members of the press is a pillar of a functioning democracy.”

But Craig Cameron, the lawyer for the Attorney General of Canada, said Bracken didn’t have the right to breach a court injunction, no matter what she did for a living.

He said “anyone with a cellphone [or] a blog is part of the extended definition of media.”

“A lot of people are in a newsgathering function now, pretty much everyone. So if you’re going to give people gathering information preferential treatment, you’re giving everyone preferential treatments. And what does that even mean?” he said.

The suit states Bracken stationed herself inside a tiny cabin inside the “exclusion zone” of the area covered by the court injunction so that she could photograph the handful of Wet’suwet’en protesters as police closed in to end the standoff.

But the police and government response to the lawsuit says Bracken and several pipeline opponents were in the 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.”

Cameron told the court that Bracken and The Narwhal were trying to establish that journalists should be given “unfettered access” to events and get special treatment.

The Narwhal’s acting editor-in-chief Carol Linnitt said in a statement before the trial started on Monday that injunction zones allow the RCMP alone to “determine what journalism is, who performs it, where and how.”

“Whatever form of freedom of press we can say we have in this country will utterly wither under these circumstances,” she said.

This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.