When a cop shoots a citizen, and it’s caught on video, the news value of that tape is clear: an officer of the law, sworn to protect the public, has killed a member of that public. TV stations have no trouble running that, gruesome and terrible as the footage might end up being.
But what happens if the person who has died is a teen, and the alleged killer is not a police officer, but another civilian?
This was the question Jill Krop, Global BC’s news director, faced last week when a 13 year old was stabbed to death in an apparently random stabbing at her school. Krop decided to run the footage, and now, some of the public wants Krop to resign.
Global BC ran footage — on their evening newscast, and online — of a stabbing in an Abbotsford, B.C. school that left Letisha Reimer dead. People are not happy the network published footage of a teenager’s violent death, and now they’re looking to oust Krop.
They’ve turned to an online petition calling for Krop to step down from her job, as first reported by the Georgia Straight. Nearly 1,400 people — at last count — had signed on to the petition.
In it, the petitioners ask Krop to resign for putting the video online and on the evening newscast. “There is absolutely no way to justify the publication of that video, and by choosing to air the video Jill Krop and the rest of the staff at Global BC are re-victimizing those directly affected by Tuesday’s incident,” the petition reads.
Krop declined to comment when reached by email, passing all questions to Global’s corporate PR team. CANADALAND will update this story when they reply. But, the news director did appear on local talk-radio station CKNW — owned by Corus, the same parent company as Global — to explain the rationale for running the footage.
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editor@canadalandshow.com

Here's a partial transcript of what @JillKrop did say to @drex and @steeletalks980 about posting the video: https://t.co/u58BeiJq8U pic.twitter.com/nLFyjfIU2l
— Justin McElroy (@j_mcelroy) November 3, 2016

“We looked at the video, and immediately decided not to air it right away. And I literally said to my colleagues, ‘This is in all likelihood the last minutes of someone’s life, we do not need to put it on TV two hours after it’s happened,’ ” Krop said, in the interview. “We decided that by 11 o’clock, a very different audience, an older audience, no children in the room, we could air that video blurred. It’s still a difficult decision to make.”
The video appears to have since been removed from Global’s main story on the stabbing.
Gabriel Klein has been charged with second-degree murder over the teen’s death.

It’s been a frantic week in Québec’s media community. The City of Montreal Police Service (SPVM) acknowledged Monday it had tracked La Presse reporter Patrick Lagacé’s phone calls during an investigation into one of its own officers. It later emerged that at least six other reporters had their calls tracked by the SPVM or Québec’s provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec. None of the reporters were suspected of any crime; the surveillance appeared to be part of an internal crackdown on what SPVM chief Philippe Pichet has called “leak culture.”
Pichet has defended his department’s actions, saying officers acted within the rules. Officers appear to have followed the letter of the law, and according to a growing chorus of lawyers and elected officials, that’s precisely the problem.
In the Lagacé case, officers received 24 separate warrants which allowed them to track the reporter’s incoming and outgoing calls, as well as his phone’s location, for seven months. “In principle, the police need to show evidence when applying for a warrant,” explains Pierre Trudel, a professor at the Université de Montréal law school, who specializes in media law. “They need to convince a judge that the information they’re looking for will allow them to prove whether a crime was committed. They also need to prove there’s no other way to get the information they need. In this case, it seems like the judge was exceptionally easily convinced.”
“It was clear that the police did get the required permission, and incorrectly applying the law isn’t the same as breaking it,” said human rights lawyer Julius Grey, who along with 13 other lawyers signed an open letter denouncing the surveillance.
Simon Jolin-Barrette, a lawyer and the justice critic for the Coalition Avenir Québec, a centre-right opposition party in Québec’s National Assembly, is among those calling for new laws to protect journalists from surveillance. He compares the Lagacé case to the seizure of the computer of Journal de Montréal reporter Michaël Nguyen earlier this year by SQ officers investigating a judge’s behaviour. A rival newspaper later found that all the information Nguyen had obtained was accessible via Google. “The evidence backing up the [Nguyen] search was very thin,” Jolin-Barrette said. “Information obtained via that sort of exceptional warrant should not be part of a fishing expedition and not be used to protect an organization from itself.”
“These standards have been established by a series of Supreme Court cases, and in theory, they should have the force of law in every province,” Jolin-Barrette said. “We’re looking into modifying the existing provincial law around search warrants to codify this, although we want to start with a transparent public inquiry and hear from journalists and legal experts.”
Stéphane Beaulac, constitutional law professor at the Université de Montréal, questioned the constitutionality of the ease to which police were able to monitor journalists, in a New York Times report. “It is extremely unlikely that they warranted such a broad scope,” he told the Times about warrants. “This seems to blatantly be a misapplication of the system.”
The official opposition Parti Québécois want the law to clearly define these boundaries, with justice critic Véronique Hivon calling for immediate legislation. “It’s high time we had a law that clearly affirmed the protection of journalists’ sources and the criteria that need to be respected before making the rare decision to bypass that principle,” Hivon said.
Québec’s governing Liberal Party has shied away from calling for new legislation but announced in a press release that an “independent expert committee” presided by a retired judge and including experts with backgrounds in journalism and law enforcement, would investigate police surveillance of journalists. Couillard also issued a directive stating that further requests for warrants involving phone tracking would have to be approved by the province’s director of criminal and penal prosecution.
If Québec passes legislation specifically protecting journalists and their sources, it would go further than existing federal law. “Journalists have no specific privileges under Canadian law,” said Anna Keller, professor of media law at Carleton University. “In one sense that works in journalists’ favour, because you don’t need a licence to practice journalism. But it also means that unfortunately the journalist-source relationship doesn’t have special protections. Our system relies a lot on trusting officials to follow internal rules.”
In the Lagacé case, Grey said, “the police have shown they cannot be trusted.”
“I’m hoping a law will be passed, because what the police have done has been nearly universally condemned. I’m also worried about the police using technology to hack into phones without a warrant. They couldn’t use that evidence in court, but they could use it as background information to pursue other evidence. We need a new law, but we also need a new culture where spying on journalists is considered so reprehensible that it won’t be done.”
At the federal level, Bloc Québécois MP Rhéal Fortin is calling on MPs to resurrect a 2007 bill calling for increased whistleblower protections. “We want to amend the Evidence Act, which is part of the Criminal Code, to specify that when a law enforcement body wants to access a journalist’s communications, they need to show that the information is in the public interest, not being used to settle an internal dispute, and that every effort has been made to find the information some other way. They should also have to take into account the consequences for the source,” Fortin said.
“Both the provincial and federal governments need to do their jobs,” sums up Trudel, the Université de Montréal professor. “We need to specify the very rare situations when the police could spy on journalists. If we leave the door wide open, the profession of investigative journalism is in danger, because whistleblowers will no longer speak to journalists.”
‘A Radical Attack’
Since the extent of the SPVM’s surveillance of Patrick Lagacé came to light last week, the story has made headlines around the world. “Are you a journalist? Do you think that police spying on you to identify your sources is a hypothetical? This is today,” tweeted whistleblower and press freedom advocate Edward Snowden. In a live videoconference at McGill University on Wednesday night, planned months beforehand, Snowden called the surveillance “a radical attack on freedom of the press.”

Are you a journalist? The police spying on you specifically to ID your sources isn't a hypothetical. This is today. https://t.co/6JtOIb7Q4n pic.twitter.com/p4pURXH4nU
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 31, 2016

“The local police can go to a justice of the peace and they will happily say, okay, unlock the GPS on the guy’s phone, find out anyone he met with and who he called,” Snowden said. “Can we at least debate in a reasoned way the idea that law is beginning to fade as a guarantor of our rights? We the public know almost nothing about how [law enforcement] operate, and that inverts the dynamic of private citizens and public officials into a brave new world of private officials and public citizens.”
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@mllemarguerite
PHOTO: Thien/Flickr

A Vancouver-based feminist journalist is accusing Rabble.ca of censorship after the left-wing news and opinion website published her blog post about a Planned Parenthood Twitter campaign that referred to women as “menstruators,” only to remove it several hours later for containing “transphobic language.”
Meghan Murphy, founder of Feminist Current, was an unpaid blogger and podcast contributor to Rabble for several years, occasionally writing paid pieces before being hired on as a part-time West Coast evening editor in December 2013. Though the position came to an end earlier this year, she would cross-post most of the content she produced for her own site to Rabble, until last month.
In an Oct. 21 Facebook post, Murphy announced her split with the site:
About a month ago, I informed rabble.ca I would no longer be contributing to or working with the site. This has been a long time coming for a number of reasons, but I chose to stay on in the past because I knew that if I left, never again would we see an abolitionist or radical feminist voice or analysis there, and I felt it important to ensure a feminist analysis existed in a space that claims to be a progressive and leftist one.
In a phone interview with CANADALAND, Murphy said she was dismayed when the article was removed without informing her.
“Nobody contacted me to let me know that they took it down,” she said. “If you’re not going publish somebody’s article or if you’re going to go so far as to take somebody’s article down, you’re obviously supposed to contact them.”
The original post went up Sept. 7, and was removed several hours later. The piece concludes with Murphy stating:
You see, the reason patriarchy exists is because men decided they wanted control over women’s sexual and reproductive capacities. Not people’s sexual and reproductive capacities — women’s. Sexual subordination is a gendered phenomenon, no matter how you identify, and for an organization that exists to advocate on behalf of women — due to their female biology (you know, the thing that placed them, whether or not they chose it or like it, within an oppressed class of people) — to erase that is unconscionable.
A woman is an adult female human — it really is as simple as that. And understanding how that reality is at the root of our ongoing oppression under patriarchy is one thing that is not up for debate.
When she noticed the article had been removed, Murphy contacted Rabble’s blogs and opinions editor Michael Stewart.
In an email exchange provided to CANADALAND, Stewart told Murphy that the “article was removed because it contained transphobic language and violated our journalistic policy,” adding that Rabble publisher Kim Elliott would be in touch soon after.
In an email to Murphy on Sept. 13, Elliott laid out Rabble’s case for removing the post:
Your last piece was disappointing to me after the many conversations you’ve had with our editors about our journalism policy, and the issues concerning transphobic commentary. It is unfortunate that you do not see the problems around the erasure of trans male identity in the piece. In our analysis, the piece denies the gendered identity of trans men who menstruate by implying that if a person has ovaries and a uterus, they are by virtue of those biological markers, a woman.…The blog pits women’s rights against trans rights and trans identity is dehumanized, dismissed and erased in the process. This is tantamount to the expression of transphobic ideas, which violates our journalistic policy. This is why the piece was unpublished.
Murphy heard again from Elliott in mid Oct., where the publisher apologized for the long delay in providing an explanation, and hoped the writer would blog for Rabble again in the future.
Murphy is no stranger to controversy. In May 2015, an online petition called for her ouster from Rabble over her abolitionist views about the decriminalization of sex work, a point of view she says put her at odds with the pro-decriminalization stance of most Rabble staffers. A counter petition sprung up in support of Murphy.
“At that point I started to feel like Rabble was trying to push me out, to be honest,” Murphy told CANADALAND. “A lot of the staff just stopped talking to me after that petition.”
While her stance on sex work — she is steadfast abolitionist — put her at odds with Rabble staffers, her views on “transactivism” leaves her, an avowed socialist, in strange company criticizing public policies such as Bill C-16, which had support among NDP and federal Liberal MPs.
“The only people who voted against it or spoke out against it were Conservatives, and that’s really frustrating,” she said. “The feminist movement and ideology comes into conflict with transactivism because of our understanding of gender and gender roles and  why gender exists and how it works to support the subordination of women and to support men’s power….That’s not what the right is worried about at all. The right is worried about maintaining gender roles.”
In an email to CANADALAND, managing editor Michelle Gregus defended Rabble’s decision to pull the post:
After Meghan cross-posted a blog on rabble from her own site, Feminist Current, the post in question was flagged by an editor who felt it contained transphobic language. On reviewing it, I agreed with the assessment and because the use of transphobic language violates rabble’s journalistic policy, decided to not publish it … Meghan responded to this decision by deciding to leave Rabble. 
In a follow-up email, Gregus said Rabble blogs aren’t commissioned by editors, and it’s up to the writer to make sure they follow the site’s guidelines before publishing. “If a blog is found to be in violation of our journalistic policy, the writer is contacted, and when possible, corrections are requested,” she said.
“I believe that they’re censoring feminist speech, and that that’s not okay,” Murphy said. “Whether or not we disagree about gender identity or transactivism or any of the ideas, I’m not opposed to disagreement existing or to the conversations happening or to the debate happening. But what’s happening is that the debate and the conversation is being shut down and not even allowed to happen, so opposing voices and dissent are not allowed to exist, or if they do exist, they’re just labeled with this blanket transphobia and the actual ideas aren’t being engaged with.”
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PHOTO: scATX/Flickr
UPDATE: A previous version of this story referred to sex work as “prostitution.”

Police in the province of Quebéc are increasingly using the legal system to intimidate and spy on journalists.
So it goes for Patrick Lagacé of La Presse who’s had his phone monitored by Montréal police for months, as SPVM officers looked to hunt down his sources—who they suspected were themselves police officers.
Lagacé was tailed and police regularly used GPS to locate the reporter and his phone. The numbers dialled for all Lagacé’s incoming and outgoing calls, and who he sent and received text messages from were all collected by Montréal police. This was all authorized by a Quebéc judge.
The columnist told the French-language CBC the spying was an intimidation tactic by the police.
“What shocks me is that a judge decided this is perfectly normal in a democracy,” he said in an interview with Radio-Canada. “When we start spying on journalists…there are questions to be asked about who the judges are [who] are authorizing these warrants.”
Montréal’s police chief defended his department’s spying on the columnist as something done within the law, with the proper approval of a judge. “We respected every law to obtain the warrant we got. We followed the rules, and the judge authorized the warrant,” Philippe Pichet told reporters.
“This operation targeted one of our officers and not Mr. Lagacé,” Pichet said. “The SPVM, and myself, we are very conscientious about the importance of respecting the freedom of the press. However, the SPVM also has the responsibility to carry out investigations on criminal acts — even against police officers.”
The surveillance is part of a wider pattern in a province where journalists are increasingly under threat from police forces looking to maintain a squeaky-clean public image.
At Le Journal de Montréal, reporter Michaël Nguyen has his laptop seized by police after reporting on a story about the bad behaviour of a judge after a Christmas party. The computer was taken so Nguyen’s sources could be identified.
But, all of the documents Nguyen quoted from were available online for anyone to find, the rival La Presse later found. Using information contained in the warrant used by police to seize the laptop, a La Presse reporter was able to retrace Nguyen’s steps and access all of the documents from an unsecured Judicial Council of Quebéc website.
Newspapers aren’t the only outlets under assault. Radio-Canada is being sued by a 40 provincial police officers in Val d’Or, Que. The officers say their reputations have been damaged, and their interactions with the community poisoned after Radio-Canada ran reports of alleged sexual abuse by members force in the indigenous community. That lawsuit is being funded by the Provincial Police Association of Quebéc.
Legal threats like this can have a chilling effect on journalists in Canada. A journalist’s right to protect sources is not absolute. In a 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada said journalists are able to protect the identity of their sources, but that right is applicable on a case-by-case basis.
In an age where media companies are struggling to make money, the possibility of a long legal battle can have a chilling effect on news outlets. The threat isn’t only in losing a court case, but in having one grind on for ages.
It’s also impossible to account for the effect this has on the willingness of sources to approach journalists, if they’re worried their identity can be made public in a courtroom.
With that in mind, La Presse lawyers were in court Monday morning looking to keep Lagacé’s phone records from being used in open court, in order to keep the sources off the public record.
Lagacé was under surveillance as part of an investigation into officers accused of fabricating drug evidence, the newspaper said. This, in turn, led to police trying to figure out if one of the officers under investigation was leaking information to the press. The spying was discovered when another journalist found repeated references to Lagacé in court documents, according to a CBC report. The officer was never charged in the leak investigation, the Toronto Star said.
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@robert_hiltz

The author of a short story which was censored for its profanity wants her story pulled from The Walrus.
Eden Robinson’s story, Nanas I Have Loved, had the majority of the swearing removed in editing. It is set for publication in an upcoming issue of the magazine.
Denise Bukowski, Robinson’s agent, wrote in an email Sunday, “I am writing to inform you that Eden Robinson does not wish to publish her story in your magazine. Please remove it immediately. Since you have not yet sent her a copy-edited draft, or paid her, there is plenty of time to do so.”
Bukowski’s email was sent to The Walrus publisher Shelley Ambrose and two other staffers at the magazine. It and Ambrose’s reply were copied to CANADALAND.
“Your staff member’s anonymous comments to Canadaland make Walrus a magazine she does not wish to support,” Bukowski said.
CANADALAND previously reported much of the swearing in Nanas had been removed at the request of senior editors, after the magazine received complaints about a now-infamous owl-fucking story. Fiction editor Nick Mount said he quit the magazine over the edits to the story.
“Eden graciously undertook two rounds of ‘editing’ to meet your vague standards of what constituted offensive language. Then your fiction editor was asked for a third round, so he quit,” Bukowski said. “In response, your editors publicly denied that any censorship occurred. Then they claimed to be merely editing ‘juvenile’ writing — writing that had been selected and edited by your fiction editor, from a beloved, award-winning writer whose most famous book, MONKEY BEACH, is in its 25th printing in paperback and is used in school and universities across the country.”
Walrus publisher Shelley Ambrose replied saying she would look into the situation.
“As far as I can tell, no one from The Walrus is quoted in that story and it certainly does not reflect our stance on fiction or anything else,” Ambrose said in a reply. “Not remotely.”
A source at The Walrus previously spoke to CANADALAND anonymously, on the condition they not be quoted directly. Their comments were paraphrased for publication, but the word “juvenile” was used to describe the amount of profanity in the first draft.
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@robert_hiltz

PHOTO: John McFadden, right, speaks with his lawyer outside a Yellowknife, NWT courthouse. Cody Punter/CANADALAND

A Yellowknife reporter charged with obstructing justice for taking pictures of a crime scene was acquitted, with the judge calling the testimony of the arresting RCMP officers “exaggerated.”
John McFadden, a 54-year-old reporter with Northern News Services, was arrested in the early hours of July 5, 2015 while taking photos of police searching a van in downtown Yellowknife.
During the trial, RCMP accused McFadden — who came to crime scene after having been in a bar across the street — of being intoxicated and aggressive toward police, with one officer testifying “it’s a huge officer safety liability to have an angry man with a camera in the area where you’re trying to work.”
Judge Garth Malakoe rejected the claims that McFadden was drunk and scolded two of the officers for being “inconsistent” and “obstinate” in their testimonies, in his judgement handed down in territorial court Oct. 21.
“What is concerning…is a certain willingness on the part of two officers to exaggerate to make a point and to evade answering certain questions,” Malakoe said. “It is unfortunate when the court observes these traits in professional witnesses when they are testifying to matters that are not central to the case. It means the court must treat their testimony with caution.”
‘Vindication’
In a telephone interview McFadden told CANADALAND he was relieved the 15-month ordeal was finally over.
“I feel 110 per cent vindication. I went to court that day with the hope that I would be found not guilty but that even if I was, [I thought] the judge was going to say something about my actions that night that did not reflect well upon me. He did not. What he said is that he believed me,” he said.
McFadden, who wept in the courtroom as the decision was handed down, added that the process took an emotional toll on him.
“I think I can roll with the punches with the best of them but this has been a very trying time and it’s been a very long time,” he said. “I’m not here gloating, I’m not here basking. I’m just trying to get on with my life.”
According to the facts of the case, during the three and a half minutes McFadden was taking pictures he was twice cautioned by RCMP officers to step back from the scene. He complied each time. When one of the officers saw the reporter’s camera lens come close to an open door where the police were searching, McFadden was arrested and charged.
After hearing testimony from the three Mounties, a witness who is a friend of McFadden’s, and McFadden himself, Judge Malakoe said the accused had not been given clear boundaries by police.
“He was told that he could take photographs from the sidewalk and to stay away from the van. There was no police tape outlining these boundaries. He was not given precise instructions as to what ‘stay away’ meant.”
Malakoe concluded the reporter had no intent to obstruct police officers and was simply trying to do his job.
“McFadden testified that when he saw the police emergency lights flashing and the lane blocked off he ran to investigate. It was part of his job to investigate, It was part of his job to take photographs. When he took [the final photograph] before being arrested, he did so when thought that he would not be interfering with any police officers.”
Before he was charged, McFadden had a somewhat contentious relationship with RCMP. In the winter of 2015, they took issue with McFadden reporting that RCMP had failed to notify the public there was a sexual assault suspect at large. Two weeks later another home was broken into and another person was sexually assaulted. The suspect in the original assault was charged for both incidents, leading police to change their policy about notifying the media regarding potential threats to the public. Several months before his arrest, McFadden was also was banned from an RCMP press conference due to an email which police claimed had a “disrespectful tone.”
‘It’s the mindset of the force’
Bruce Valpy, the managing editor of Northern News Services told CANADALAND that the fact McFadden was arrested and charged for doing his job points to a fundamental gap in police training and psychology.
“[Police] have an important role in society, perhaps the most important role, so it’s only natural the press in its role in society covers them, bad or good,” he said. “The press is 90 per cent positive, but it’s that 10 per cent that gets stuck in their craw. They don’t see that the press has a role to play they just see us as mad dogs and that’s quite a mistake.”
Valpy said if nothing else, the trial had helped clarify boundaries for RCMP and media. However, he added that there was still a ways to go to bring their relationship up to snuff.
“The relationship [between RCMP and media] is dependent on the training they receive and the mindset of the force in general, which is lacking a communication strategy that works for everybody,” he said.
“The problem isn’t the officers or the individuals it’s the mindset of the force.”
Valpy said he hadn’t spoken with RCMP since the decision was handed down, but he suggested such a conversation might be useful.
Yellowknife RCMP declined an interview request from CANADALAND but issued a statement saying: “This verdict is the result of the judicial process, in which we participate and support. We respect the decision of the court.”
While the case has been settled the question remains as to whether or not McFadden will return to his beat covering cops and courts in Yellowknife.
McFadden was reassigned when he was charged in order to avoid a conflict of interest. McFadden said he doesn’t have an axe to grind and that he is keen to get back to doing what he loves best. “I’d like to be optimistic that that relationship with the RCMP can be repaired.”
Valpy said he has yet to to broach the issue with McFadden but that it was just a matter of time until that happened.
“I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t go back to it.” he said. “As matter of fact I think he’ll be a little more agile when he gets in that type of situation again, because it was an agonizing process.”
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@bordersnbetween
Disclosure: Cody Punter is a former employee of Northern News Services and worked alongside John McFadden.

Photo by Cody Punter. 

When the fiction editor at The Walrus resigned last month, he was protesting what he saw as the limiting of icky swears in the magazine. But Nick Mount’s protest was in vain, as the story he quit over will be running in the winter issue with much of its profanity stripped out.  
Mount’s frustration stemmed not from obscenities being censored, but the lack of a clear line. “A big part of the problem that led to my resignation [was] the lack of clear limits from the magazine’s publisher or EIC on what language was permissible and what wasn’t,” he said.
What started the discussion of how much profanity was okay in the magazine’s pages, was a now-infamous story by friend-of-CANADALAND Stephen Marche where an owl is fucked to death.
“After the Marche story, the publisher, Shelley Ambrose, said we’d had complaints and asked me to find stories with less ‘dark, violent, abusive, icky, fucky themes,’ ” Mount said.
Ambrose did not reply to several requests for comment.
Following that conversation, Mount was asked to tone down the language in a story by Eden Robinson. “It’s called ‘Nanas I Have Loved,’ and is adapted from the opening chapter of Eden’s new novel Son of a Trickster,” he said. In the story, “the boy’s mother swears a lot, which the story itself criticizes, though the boy’s father.”
After twice going through the story to remove much of the swearing, Mount had had enough and resigned, he said.
But to one source at the magazine familiar with the situation, the whole thing has taken on a tinge of farce in the office. Editors found the swearing in the original draft to be heavy enough that it bordered on juvenile. The edits were made not with an eye on censoring the language, but to tone it down, the source said. There’s no “family-friendly” diktat at the magazine.
Despite that, Mount is no longer the fiction editor and ‘Nanas’ has had its cursing dramatically scaled back, as shown in a draft obtained by CANADALAND. “Shit” appears twice, and “fuck” not at all. Numerous “cunt”s were also dropped from an earlier draft of the story. “Frig” is entirely absent.
The author, Robinson, could not be reached for comment. Mount said the story will appear, uncensored, as the first chapter of her book Son of a Trickster, to be published this winter.
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@robert_hiltz

A reporter staked out at the centre of the protest of a massive hydro-electric dam project in Labrador has been marked for arrest, in an order issued by a court Tuesday.
Justin Brake, a reporter for the provincial news site The Independent, has been covering protests at the construction site of the Muskrat Falls dam project. Peaceful occupiers have been at the site since the weekend. Brake’s name was listed alongside that of almost two-dozen protestors in a Labrador court order, according to a report in The Telegram.
UPDATE: Tuesday afternoon, Brake left the encampment so he could continue reporting on the story, The Independent tweeted. Brake said having to chose between telling a story and risking arrest is not a situation a journalist should be put in, according to The Independent, and it wasn’t an easy decision.

Indy journalist leaving #MuskratFalls camp in order to continue covering story #nlpoli #cdnpoli #journalism
— The Independent (@IndependentNL) October 25, 2016

No journalist should ever be forced to make this choice – Indy editor Justin Brake #nlpoli #cdnpoli #MuskratFalls
— The Independent (@IndependentNL) October 25, 2016

"I had to go where the important story was, and esp. the story no one else was telling" – Indy editor Brake #MuskratFalls #nlpoli #cdnpoli
— The Independent (@IndependentNL) October 25, 2016

The injunction gives the RCMP the authority to arrest those on the list and anyone else unauthorized on the site if they don’t leave. News reports have estimated there are about 50 people are on the site.
The protestors, who self-identify as “land protectors,” have been camped out in the worker’s barracks on the site in an effort to halt the building of the dam since the weekend, news reports have said. They’re concerned flooding the reservoir will raise levels of methyl mercury, a toxic heavy metal, to unsafe levels. This could poison the salmon and seal much of the Indigenous community relies on.
https://twitter.com/TelegramJames/status/790922251138916352
The province has said it would monitor levels of the substance upon completing the dam, but planned to go ahead with the project all the same.
The protestor’s concerns are backed up by a Harvard University study of the watershed. The dam is being built by Nalcor, a provincial Crown Corporation, and its construction has lead to a massive upheaval in Newfoundland and Labrador politics. Tuesday afternoon, the Premier Dwight Ball was meeting with Indigenous leaders in St. John’s.
Muskrat Falls is on the Lower Churchill river, some 25 kilometres west of Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
Sympathetic protests have sounded in a number of cities across the country this weekend, including one in Ottawa where four hunger-striking protestors from Labrador hoped to draw the attention of the federal government.
CANADALAND has reached out to Brake, and we’ll update our story if we hear back.
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@robert_hiltz

On the cover of the March issue of The Walrus, Death makes his merry way through a meadow, killing everything he touches. It’s a story of saving the world for the living by dissolving the dead, with the power of nature.
While the story was written by staffer at the magazine, a freelance writer says she pitched the idea first. Pitch stealing is a serious charge, one not far below outright plagiarism.
Ann Silversides emailed a pitch to the magazine to write a story about the facility in Smith Falls, Ont., on July 6, 2015. Three weeks later on the 27th, she received a rejection letter from the magazine saying the magazine was already working on a similar story. The next day, July 28, Graeme Bayliss was out reporting the story, according to an email he sent at the time.
Silversides was out of the country, but when she returned to Canada in May of this year to see a very familiar story gracing the cover of the magazine, she was taken aback. She sent a letter to the Walrus, asking for an explanation.
When confronted with the accusation of possible theft, Walrus editor-in-chief Jonathan Kay promised to look into the matter, in an email to Silversides sent in May. Kay said if her pitch was stolen, the magazine would pay her $1,500, the usual fee for a story of its nature.
From: Jonathan Kay
Date: 18 May 2016
Subject: Re: The Walrus calling
To: Ann Silversides
Thanks
I am investigating this. I am going to give everyone involved a chance to give me their side of the story.
If we determine that your idea was stolen, I will pay you the amount of money I would have paid for a finished draft of your article — which in this case would be $1500.
Best, Jon.
At this point, publisher Shelley Ambrose took the reins. In a long email to Silversides on June 2, Ambrose said she had spoken with staff and looked at prior research and concluded the pitch was not stolen.
The key paragraph (the full text can be found below*):
“I have now been able to not only talk to current and former editorial staff — including our editor-in-chief [Jonathan Kay], as well as the author of the Dissolving the Dead’ [Bayliss] and I have gone back to look at research timelines and more. And, although Graeme Bayliss did not actually do the interviews or write the story until much later, he did, in fact, pitch it — in June 2015 — to the then managing editor — a month before your pitch arrived. He had also – inspired by a short article he had read — done some early research (I actually have seen the dated Google records) in order to pitch the story internally. So the response you were given to your pitch at the time — perfunctory as it was, was the simple truth. We did, in fact, have a story about that very thing in the mix already, so we cannot agree that your pitch — excellent as it was — was the basis of ‘Dissolving the Dead.’ ” We all agree, however, that your pitch was timely and that the idea was obviously a good one.
There was a problem with this explanation. The managing editor at the time, Kyle Wyatt, has since said he did not know about the pitch before Bayliss had gone reporting the story. In a comment on Story Board, a news site run by the Canadian Media Guild frequented by freelance writers. Wyatt says the first he heard of the story was when Bayliss sent him an email saying he was off to report it.

I had been away from the office for a week or so, on an annual canoe trip in Nebraska. Beyond this email and processing a rental car receipt shortly after Bayliss’s visit to Smith Falls, I had no involvement with the story—the pitching, the writing, or the editing.
Shelley Ambrose cannot produce the emails that Ann Silversides has requested, detailing the June 2015 commissioning, because they simply do not exist; I made no such decision to “proceed with the story as planned.”

The content of the email, which CANADALAND has seen independently, reads [emphasis ours]:
From: Graeme Bayliss
Date: July 28 2015
Subject: Out of office Thursday
To: Kyle Wyatt, Jonathan Kay
“Just a heads-up that I’ll be away Thursday, driving out to Smiths Falls to report on a story. (Kyle: I pitched a story to Jon while you were away; broadly, it’s about a new bio-cremation facility. The man who runs it has offered to give me a tour and an interview. The drive is about four hours each way.)”
Graeme
Ambrose did not reply to requests for comment, nor did she provide any of the evidence that cleared the magazine. Kay, the editor-in-chief, said he was unable to speak on the record, and directed all questions to Ambrose. When reached for comment, Bayliss said he could not talk about anything that happened during his time at the Walrus, as he had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
This is not the first time Walrus staff have been accused of using a freelancer’s work in house. Last year, freelancer Alex Gillis said the investigative work he did for a story on cheating in universities was entirely reworked into an essay written by Wyatt. The writer, Gillis, received part of his fee when the story was killed, and an apology from Kay.
In her email to the freelancer, Ambrose said the magazine had done a poor job communicating with Silversides, and should have been more forthcoming with the writer.
“The editors who read your pitch should have called you or written to tell you exactly what was on the [schedule] here and involved you or even assigned the story to you,” Ambrose wrote. “Instead the managing editor at the time decided to stay on the course he was already on. However frustrating this may be in retrospect, it was his prerogative.”
Reached by phone, Wyatt confirmed his involvement in the story was limited to receiving Bayliss’s email and processing a car rental receipt, echoing his early Story Board comment.
Silversides wasn’t satisfied with Ambrose’s response. Despite promises to improve communication with the writer, Ambrose did not reply to an email from Silversides asking for further proof last June.
She’s still waiting.
—With files from Jane Lytvynenko
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@robert_hiltz
*The full text of Ambrose’s email to Silversides:
From: Shelley Ambrose
Date: 2 June 2016
Subject: “Dissolving the Dead”
To: Ann Silversides
Hello Ann.
I am. Shelley Ambrose here. I am the publisher of the magazine and the exec director of the Walrus Foundation. Jon handed your correspondence on to me and I want to apologize for the length of time (i am on the road with The Walrus Talks) it has taken me to thoroughly check it out. We took this accusation of story stealing very seriously and can absolutely see how you might come to the conclusion that that is what occurred and so I wanted to turn over every rock.  
I have now been able to not only talk to current and former editorial staff — including our editor-in-chief, as well as the author of the “Dissolving the Dead” and I have gone back to look at research timelines and more. And, although Graeme Bayliss did not actually do the interviews or write the story until much later, he did, in fact, pitch it — in June 2015 — to the then managing editor — a month before your pitch arrived. He had also — inspired by a short article he had read — done some early research (I actually have seen the dated Google records) in order to pitch the story internally. So the response you were given to your pitch at the time – perfunctory as it was, was the simple truth. We did, in fact, have a story about that very thing in the mix already, so we cannot agree that your pitch — excellent as it was — was the basis of “Dissolving the Dead.”  We all agree, however, that your pitch was timely and that the idea was obviously a good one.
We also all agree that our communication with you was woefully inadequate. In fact, the editors who read your pitch should have called you or written to tell you exactly what was on the sced here and involved you or even assigned the story to you. Instead the managing editor at the time decided to stay on the course he was already on. However frustrating this may be in retrospect, it was his prerogative.
I am copying Jon Kay on this because I know he, too, wishes the response to you at the time had been very different. Again, your pitch was excellent and we very much hope you will give us another chance. I know Jon is eager to talk to you about a few stories he is assigning and is also eager to hear your ideas. I can promise you that he will be very forthcoming with details of what we are currently working on, what is in our mix, and where all the possibilities for future stories lie and that all future communication will be much more, well, helpful and detailed.
Truly — Shelley

While many Montrealers were celebrating the 50th anniversary of their transit system (STM), I was protesting it. Instead of cheering on the STM on October 14, a group with reduced mobility, elderly people, and our allies fought against the discrimination we faced both in the media and within the system itself.
Meanwhile, reporting on accessibility and disability is often inaccurate, relies on stereotypes, or just doesn’t exist. Leading up to the anniversary, many in Quebec media wrote celebratory takes on 50 years of the metro. But the exclusion of accessibility coverage mirrors the 50 years disabled Montrealers have been discriminated against.
In Montreal, bus ramps are not deployed a third of the time while the STM falsely advertises a fully wheelchair accessible bus network. The metro is equipped with elevators only at 10 of the 68 stations.
When, right before the anniversary, the Montreal mayor announced that 14 more stations will become accessible, French and English journalists lauded the news. CBC and CTV were the only outlets providing a critical take. Despite activists being skeptical because of past failures, the mayor’s announcement went largely unchallenged.
That lack of skepticism spilled over into the anniversary coverage. None of the French-language media outlets covered the accessibility protest. Only one article that I could find — in Le Devoir — mentioned lack of elevators as one of the faults Montrealers find with the metro system. Out of the English language media outlets, CBC and Global TV both covered our protest.  They shared the perspectives of some people at the demonstration and basic information regarding the STM, but I personally reached out to journalists at both of these outlets before the protest.
Instead, there was coverage comparing the Montreal system to other Metros from CBC and Le Devoir. Neither mentioned accessibility despite Montreal having the least accessible subway system in Canada and the U.S. But it’s mostly when disabled people actively reach out that accessibility is covered. In “The network of the future in six steps” on La Presse+ none of the six steps address accessibility.
Other coverage focused on the metro’s history. In this CTV report, a metro enthusiast and historians are interviewed, who romanticize the metro enormously. A short Vice Quebec video shared the work of a young photographer who won an international prize for his photos of the Montreal metro. We are reminded that a lot of people don’t appreciate the beauty of the transit system. As the young photographer says, “there’s a lot to love about the Montreal metro,” the shot focuses on a long staircase in one of the stations.
While these stories do draw on my heartstrings, I don’t feel nostalgic for a time when people who looked or moved like me were even more excluded from transit and public life than they are today. A time when the ableist future was being built, brick by brick, track by track, in the belly of the city that boasts a metro like a ‘lifeline’ to the city.
There is no lack of topics to cover, either. There are over 50 human rights complaints currently filed against the STM about systemic discrimination against disabled people at the provincial human rights commission. There’s also a class action lawsuit filed by the disability rights organization RAPLIQ. One route, the 747 has had completely inaccessible buses reintroduced to the line. The STM’s website says, “Passengers must climb six steps to reach their seat. Coach buses are not equipped with an access ramp.” This means the STM is actively contradicting their “100% accessible buses” claim.
The celebration itself was held in an inaccessible metro station. After an outcry from transit users with reduced mobility, Transport Mesadapte, and RUTA (the group representing paratransit users) STM said they would make the Place-des-Arts station accessible only for the day of the anniversary. “On this occasion, the site for the festivities will be temporarily accessible via Place des Arts building for people with reduced mobility.” Why aren’t more reporters asking about the other 364 days of the year?
Without broad and well-researched media coverage of transit accessibility in Quebec — and nationally — we’re looking at more of the same as we approach a presumably romanticized and ableist future. Sure, we’ll have new cars and cellphone service on the metro, but people who can’t do the 80-odd steps up and down at most stations will be excluded from this part of public life. It has been 50 years with little progress.

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