Carol Linnitt, co-founder of The Narwhal sent an email to people on the organization’s mailing list. I hope everyone reading this will respond to her plea for financial assistance for their lawsuit against the RCMP about the egregious treatment of Amber Bracken. She was arrested and kept in jail for days for doing nothing more than her job as a journalist. Police didn’t want public discussion about their activities as corporate protectors, so arresting a reporter and intimidating others was their response.

Below the separator is the message from Ms. Linnitt. Her organization needs our financial support. Taxpayers are already paying huge sums to defend the RCMP’s wrongdoers, so if you help the Narwhal, you’ll be helping to finance both sides of this action. Support given The Narwhal would be voluntary; the support for defending the RCMP is compulsory for each taxpaying citizen.

I have great respect for Carol Linnitt and the journalists of The Narwhal. They have dealt with issues that legacy media prefers to ignore. These people deserve our help.

This past April, I flew to Vancouver, took a glass elevator up a glimmering skyscraper and entered a boardroom full of lawyers. I was grilled, for hours, about details of The Narwhal’s press freedom lawsuit against the RCMP.

It was part of the official process leading up to our trial — and I’m not going to lie, it was one of the most nerve-wracking days of my professional life. While I can’t disclose any details of what went on to the record that day, the questions the lawyers asked me drove home, once again, just how high the stakes are in this fight.

With our five-week trial now officially scheduled to begin in January, things are getting real. And so are the costs.

We launched this case because photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested by the RCMP while on assignment for The Narwhal in Wet’suwet’en territory in 2021 — at the height of tensions over the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern British Columbia. 

Amber was handcuffed, held in a cell for three nights and had her camera gear and photographs seized — all for doing her job.

Amber’s arrest was a clear violation of her Charter rights — and The Narwhal’s. And now, we are preparing to take one of the most powerful institutions in the country to court to defend press freedom in Canada.

But we need your help to get there. 

We need to raise $60,000 this month to cover our immediate court costs — including booking courtrooms, paying for expert witnesses and preparing documents for trial.

This case is about more than one arrest. It’s about defending the right of every journalist in Canada to report freely, without fear of police interference. 

The RCMP and the Attorney General of Canada draw on taxpayer dollars to fund their defence. But our case relies on the courage of hundreds of extraordinary people like you willing to chip in whatever you can afford so we can fight back.

This case has the potential to set a powerful precedent for press freedom across the country, not only for individual journalists, but for publications too. But we are a small, non-profit newsroom — and we can’t do this without you.

Will you stand with us and support our fight for press freedom today?

With deep gratitude,

Carol Linnitt
Co-founder, interim executive director and editor-in-chief

P.S. Every dollar you give goes directly toward this legal challenge. Will you help our small newsroom stand up to the RCMP in court? If just one per cent of people reading this email give $20 each, we’ll raise $60,000 in a heartbeat.

Update, July 17

An email from journalist Matt Simmons at The Narwhal carried a message from Carol Linnit. Here is part of it:

On Tuesday evening, I asked for your support to pay for some of the immediate costs of our press freedom lawsuit against the RCMP, which we launched in response to the arrest of photojournalist Amber Bracken while covering tensions over the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Wet’suwet’en territory in 2021.

I asked you to stand with us in our fight, and did you ever: more than 1,000 of you stepped up. We blew through our goal of raising $60,000, with the total now at more than $94,000 — and counting. That’s incredible.

The RCMP and the Attorney General of Canada draw on taxpayer dollars to fund their defence. But our case relies on the courage of hundreds of extraordinary people like you willing to chip in whatever you can afford so we can fight back. From the bottom of our grateful hearts, thank you so very much. With you standing beside us, we will take this important case as far as it needs to go.

Thanks also for the many great questions you’ve sent this week about the case. You’ll find answers to the ones we hear most often in this FAQ. 

I think it is great that people are stepping up to help The Narwhal. Contributions will gain the donor a charitable tax receipt.

One of the reasons to offer ongoing support to Ms. Linnitt’s organization is that legacy media has eliminated or reduced the resources that used to ensure comprehensive news coverage. In British Columbia, the quality of news reporting by radio, TV, and newspapers is far below what it was 25 years ago. News sites like The Narwhal and The Tyee provide useful news and opinions.

Perhaps readers can tell us about other independent news operations that are worth following.

Update, July 23

Carol Linnitt, co-founder, interim executive director and editor-in-chief of The Narwhal, sent out another message about fundraising for their press freedom war chest. It is worth repeating.

The saying of being “beside oneself” is used so often in expressions of gratitude that it can feel a little contrived.  But throughout the past week, as I watched you and more than 1,500 other people come forward to donate $145,000 to our press freedom fundraiser, there were times when I physically felt outside of my own body. My mind whizzed back and forth between the present, the moment photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested and the early days when The Narwhal was still an unproven concept in a dream I shared with Emma Gilchrist.  We started The Narwhal with an unwavering conviction that if we poured our heart and soul into public-interest journalism, the public would eventually see its worth and help pitch in to make it happen. Seven years in, our readers have proven that out time and time again. We now have more than 7,200 members who give what they can each month or year to keep this publication alive.  But last week I felt like we received a double dose of this magic, in ways that are hard to fathom.  Let me backtrack for a second. When we decided to pursue a case against the RCMP for Amber’s arrest, it wasn’t simply a moral calculation. As a small non-profit, we have to constantly fundraise to keep the wheels on the bus. The decision to pursue justice, for an indeterminate time and at an unknown cost, was one we feared could put The Narwhal at risk.  And yet the more we processed the experience of Amber’s arrest amongst ourselves and with the counsel of lawyers, the clearer it became that we needed to stand up for our rights and hold the police to account for throwing journalists in jail cells.  I knew it was going to be a mountain of work to bring this case. Still, I had no idea how the documents and briefings and amendments and transcripts would pile up as lawyers on both sides began in earnest to build their cases.  (Here’s a selfie I took with Amber, left, alongside our incredible legal team, left to right: Evan Cribb, Sean Hern, Merran Hergert and Mila Ghorayeb.)

In December, right before I came back to The Narwhal after a year of maternity leave, I had a call with a few team members and our lawyer to discuss how the hard costs of the upcoming trial were running up. Feeling out of the rhythm of a regular work week and daunted by the challenge of taking over lead of The Narwhal while Emma began her maternity leave (like ships in the night, the two of us!), those figures swirled in my head. Somehow, I needed to get back to my desk and fundraise for all of our operations and also a $20,000 bill for a court transcriptionist, and thousands for expert reports, and other spiraling case-related costs.

The timing felt tricky, too. I’ve expressed one hundred reasons why right now is a very difficult time for us to fundraise for the case: it feels like 10 years have passed since Amber’s arrest. Would anyone even remember this had happened? Will our January trial seem too far off to feel important to people? So much of the work of the case is confidential — how could we possibly stoke the passion of the public to care about documents and depositions they cannot see?

Despite these misgivings, putting off an ask also felt like a risk. We couldn’t just leave the burden of fundraising to the moment we were in trial. We simply had to bring our need to the public. We needed to bring it to you. 

So, imagine our surprise and delight last week, when a mere 15 hours after sending out a single email we had already surpassed our $60,000 fundraising goal. The momentum pushed a gust of warm wind into our sails. Inspired, we made the audacious decision to double our goal, which we surpassed three days later. One week since that initial email was sent, we have $144,933.71 freshly set aside in our press freedom war chest.

I am reminded again of that little something that stirred in my chest when Emma and I spoke wistfully all those years ago of what we could do as journalists, if we could find a way to partner with the public. 

We hear so often about how people are disconnected and disengaged, apathetic and suspicious of the media. But we wanted to believe in the real people obscured by those aspersions and stereotypes — people who just needed to be brought back into a meaningful relationship with journalists who actually serve them, serve the public interest.

Well, dear people, here we are. And look at what we’ve done. 

We have a long struggle ahead of us, one likely to continue well beyond the five-week trial we have barreling down on us in January. But boy, am I ever glad to be walking that path alongside all of you. What a tremendous honour and privilege. 

With all the gratitude a girl’s heart can muster, thank you.