False report of BC school lockdown amid RCMP response to pipeline blockade

This Facebook post and others like it were shared in Canada from February 7, 2020 and spread as news broke that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada’s federal law enforcement agency, had moved onto an activist camp blocking the construction site for a natural gas pipeline in northern BC, on Canada’s west coast.

The posts claim that the arrests of blockaders on February 6 led to a subsequent attempt to apprehend their children at school in the nearby town of Smithers.

“Yesterday in Smithers BC, the public school went into lockdown when RCMP arrived intending to apprehend the children of the people who were arrested on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.”

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Screenshot of a Facebook post taken on February 10

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Screenshot of a Facebook post taken on February 10, 2020

 

However, the story is false. 

Matthew Monkman, assistant superintendent for British Columbia’s school district 54, which includes Smithers, told AFP: “No school was put into lockdown. This appears to be completely fabricated.”

“Reports that the RCMP in Smithers entered a public school there to apprehend the children of people arrested at the Wet’suwet’en camp nearby are absolutely not correct,” Janelle Shoihet, a spokeswoman for the BC RCMP, told AFP in an email.

“I personally haven’t heard anything to the effect of that rumor,” Trevor Hewitt, a reporter for the local Interior News who has been covering the Wet’suwet’en blockade, also told AFP. 

The pipeline is planned to cross traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en nation in order to move natural gas from northeastern BC to Canada’s west coast for export. 

Indigenous elected officials have approved an amended route proposed by pipeline owner Coastal Gaslink. However, hereditary chiefs, who are not elected but draw authority from traditional Wet’suwet’en law, oppose the project, leading activists to block pipeline workers from accessing the Morice West Forest Service road, near Houston, BC.

In late December 2019, the BC Supreme Court gave Coastal Gaslink an injunction against protesters interfering with the pipeline’s construction, which the Mounties enforced on February 6. Six people were arrested and an exclusion zone was established around the activist camps that same day.

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Screenshot of Coastal Gaslink's web page showing the planned pipeline route

News of the RCMP dismantling the activist camps led to several solidarity protests throughout Canada and in the United States on February 8 and 9, notably with blockades of Canadian National Railway tracks.

Opponents of the pipeline reported on February 10 that several hereditary chiefs and other activists were arrested by the RCMP. An RCMP news release the same day reported that the police operation would soon be over.