Police seizure an attack on freedom of the press
I try to devote little, if any, space in this column to happenings on the local media scene, most of which can be categorized as inside baseball that is usually of more interest to fellow journalists than it is to our readers.
But with your indulgence, I’d like to break with that tradition today to discuss an extraordinary incident this week that has me and my colleagues — at the Montreal Gazette and in newsrooms throughout the city, and beyond — puzzled, worried, and more than a little angry. On Wednesday evening, Sûreté du Québec investigators executed a search warrant and seized the computer of Journal de Montréal justice reporter Michael Nguyen, searching for evidence related to a recent story the journalist broke, alleging erratic behaviour on the part of Quebec Court Judge Suzanne Vadboncoeur, who in December was caught on video berating special constables at Montreal’s Palais de justice when they had difficulty opening a garage door for her.
The SQ warrant was executed at the behest of the Conseil de la magistrature, Quebec’s judicial council, which wants to know the source of the confidential information Nguyen obtained in his reporting on Vadboncoeur. (To be clear, neither Nguyen nor anyone else at the Journal de Montréal is facing criminal charges in light of his reporting). It was unsurprising, but nonetheless heartening, to hear that the Journal de Montréal plans to vigorously fight the SQ’s warrant and intends to try to block its search of Nguyen’s computer (which is currently sealed pending a judge’s ruling). Condemnation of the SQ’s actions was also quick in coming, with the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec issuing a scathing statement, and even the National Assembly quietly, and unanimously, adopting a motion Thursday morning “reiterating the importance of the principle of protection of journalistic sources.”
The use of such confidential sources by journalists is both time-honoured and often vital in unearthing stories that public agencies in particular would vastly prefer remain private. Looking just at the work of my Montreal Gazette colleagues in recent years — I’m thinking particularly of Aaron Derfel’s investigations into the MUHC, or Linda Gyulai exposing the city’s disastrous FINA games or its sketchy, and ultimately aborted, water-meter project — highlights the importance of such confidential sources, and the need for journalists to rigorously protect their anonymity. That’s a principle even the highest court in the land has already ruled in favour of. In 2010, in what has come to be known as the “Ma Chouette” case — named after a confidential source who was instrumental in helping Globe & Mail journalist Daniel Leblanc break the story of the Liberal Party of Canada sponsorship scandal of the early 2000s — the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that journalists do indeed have the right to protect their sources (even though it’s an individual, case-by-case right, and not a blanket, constitutional one).
What’s especially worrisome in this instance is how low the bar for the SQ taking such a rare and controversial step seems to have been. Nguyen’s story, while certainly of public interest, in that it deals with the questionable behaviour of a Quebec judge, is not a matter of national security. Or of life or death. Or of anything so urgent that would warrant such a search and seizure. That the SQ nonetheless decided to take such an antagonistic approach is nothing less than a shameful attack on freedom of the press in this province.
It’s hypocritical of the SQ, too. Because I can think of very few Quebec public bodies that are more obstructionist in their dealings with journalists than the provincial police, for whom there is no fact too basic, and no detail too trivial that it can’t be kept from reporters, invariably under the guise of not compromising active SQ investigations, but in reality it’s simply a marker of the contempt with which the SQ seems to hold Quebec journalists. (In fairness, as this newspaper’s Secret Society series of a few years ago made clear, they are hardly alone in taking that type of adversarial approach.) It’s also oddly fitting that news of the SQ’s shenanigans broke on Thursday, the same day Egyptian-Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy was in town to deliver the keynote address at Concordia University’s Homecoming. Fahmy, as you may recall, spent more than 400 days in an Egyptian prison on sham charges of terrorism that were, in reality, punishment for his dogged reporting on Egypt’s successive political revolutions for the Al-Jazeera network. Egypt was widely condemned for its incarceration of Fahmy, and after months of intense public pressure, he was pardoned and freed.
The SQ’s treatment of Michael Nguyen and the Journal de Montréal does not approach the magnitude of the injustice with which Egypt handled Fahmy (and other journalists of less renown, who are regularly arrested and jailed in Egypt). But it’s a sobering reminder that freedom of the press is a fragile tenet, and the sort of infringements on it that the SQ is currently engaged in need to be fought and denounced — not just by journalists, but by anyone who values the work we do.