RCMP arrested a person wanted on a Canada-wide warrant as part of enforcing a court order in the Fairy Creek Watershed on Saturday.
B.C. RCMP said in a release issued Saturday evening that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had issued the warrant against the person.
“That person was held in police custody on the strength of those immigration warrants,” it read. The release did not include demographic details about the arrested person or details about the rationale informing the warrant.
The person was among 10 individuals arrested Saturday as RCMP continue to enforce a court injunction issued in April that grants forestry company Teal-Jones access to the site after logging opponents had blocked access, dating back to August 2020.
Police processed and released eight of the nine other individuals arrested for civil contempt of court. The remaining individual remains in custody to appear in a Nanaimo court at later date for a previous arrest.
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RCMP say they have now arrested 403 individuals, 28 of whom they had arrested previously. Of those arrested, police arrested 305 for breaching the injunction, 81 for obstruction, seven for mischief, three for breaching their release conditions, two for assaulting a police officer, one for counselling to resist arrest and one for being the object of a Canada-wide arrest warrant.
The site has turned into a flash-point of competing demands from environmentalists lamenting the continuous loss of shrinking old-growth forest ecosystems and from forest companies favouring the high-quality wood from those very same areas.
The dispute with its familiar ecological-economic fault line has also become a testing ground for relations between the Crown and Aboriginal interests.
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