masks worn by protesters to pepper-spray them, while some others dragged the demonstrators by their hair.
“We have experts in rigging, we have climbers, we have carpenters – we have all these people getting together to build amazing, beautiful things,” said Jean-François Savard, who has out in the remote Fairy Creek watershed since an injunction was granted to a logging company five months ago. “The [police] are getting very frustrated by our tenacity because we’re constantly rebuilding and coming up with new ideas. People aren’t giving up.”
The situation is identified as the biggest act of civil disobedience in the history of Canada, with more than 800 individuals arrested since April. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has been tasked with enforcing the injunction, has now come under fire, not only for their violent responses towards the protesters, but also for their failure to wear name badges, concealing their faces with “thin blue line” patches and attempting to bar media on the on-going demonstrations.
A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that the expulsion zones set up by the police, in an attempt to prevent the media from monitoring police action, was unlawful. Sergeant Chris Manseau previously claimed that what is seen on social media does not show the entirety of events and that the response of the police is based on the actions of the protesters.
Nevertheless, the conduct of the RCMP has been widely criticised, with some individuals who were a part of the War in the Woods anti-logging protests at Clayoquot Sound in the 1990s describing it as “utterly disgusting”. “At Clayoquot, the relationship between us and the RCMP was almost cordial. They did their job, we did ours,” Warren Kimmit told The Guardian. “That was the way policing should happen. There’s no question there’s nothing to be gained by the violence that’s happening here.”
