Three accused are charged with criminal contempt over Coastal GasLink pipeline blockades
The trial is underway for three people charged with criminal contempt for breaking a court order forbidding them from blocking access to the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Sleydo’ stands trial alongside Shaylynn Sampson, a Gitxsan woman with Wet’suwet’en family ties; and Corey Jocko, a Mohawk member of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy from Ontario.
The three appeared in B.C. Supreme Court in Smithers, B.C., on Monday to face one charge each of criminal contempt of court related to arrests made during a police raid to enforce the pipeline injunction in November 2021. They each pleaded not guilty. Justice Michael Tammen is hearing the case.
Among the accused is Sleydo’, also known as Molly Wickham, who has been the public face of a high-profile Indigenous land rights movement. She is a Wing Chief of Cas Yikh, a house group of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation.
Coastal GasLink was contracted to build the 670-kilometre pipeline to carry natural gas across northern British Columbia to a terminal in Kitimat, B.C., for export to Asia.
The company signed benefit agreements with 20 elected band councils along the project’s route in 2018, but several Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders refused to allow the pipeline to cross their territory.
Pipeline opponents, who call themselves land defenders, launched a series of protests and blockades on behalf of the hereditary leaders.
In December 2019, the B.C. Supreme Court granted Coastal GasLink an injunction barring protesters from impeding the construction.
The three accused were arrested on Nov. 19, 2021, when RCMP moved in on a resistance camp that had been occupying a key work site.
Sleydo’ and Sampson were arrested in the same cabin structure along Morice Forest Service Road, which was at the centre of the injunction, and Jocko was arrested at a second cabin structure along the same road.
