Muskrat Falls protesters free of criminal charges

Five protesters arrestedfor trying to stoptheMuskrat Falls hydroelectric project are now free of criminal charges related to the 2016 demonstration.

For more thanthree years, Emily Wolfrey, a mother of two from Rigolet,had a charge of breaching a court order hanging over her head.

Today, she's celebrating freedom.

"It was a big relief," she said. "It was pretty stressful having it there for that period of time."

Wolfreysays she was in adesignated "safe zone" when RCMPofficers arrested her in October 2016.

She, and others, were accused of violating a court injunction ordering people not to trespass on the construction site,obstruct any traffic to or from the damand they couldn't encourage others to do those things.

Prosecutors only recently decided she shouldn't have been charged in the first place, dropping her charge after acquitting three others and previously withdrawing another, according to her lawyer, Mark Gruchy.

Police on the scene that day were incensed by what she'd been yelling from the sidelines, she recalled.

"They didn't like what I was saying and they violently arrested me. They threw me up against one of the vehicles," she said, describing being surrounded by officers, one of whom she says grabbed her hand so hard it left bruises on her palm, injuring her thumb.

Gruchy said the Crown heard his concerns and "for its own reasons" chose to withdraw the charge against Wolfrey.

"Amongst all the cases that I've done, this has been one of the most emotional," he said, with everybody involved tied intricatelyto the land they wanted to protect from development.

The Muskrat Falls cases echosentiments felt across the country, he added, as blockades paralyze rail transportation in protest against police presence on Indigenous land in British Columbia.

Those types of demonstrations and the way the justice system deals with them are now resembling a pattern for Gruchy.

"We find ourselvesin this situation where now injunctions are being vigorously deployed, usually by corporations," he said.

"That's extremely dispiriting to me and sad."

Wolfrey, while relieved she escaped legal repercussions for what she and Gruchy believe was an unfounded arrest, still recalled her decision to protest with a mixture of defiance and disappointment.

"I wasn't going to give in. I was going to stand my ground," she said.

"I've done this for my kids, so they can grow up living the way I lived, the way my parents lived, my grandparents lived," by hunting and foraging, using land-based resources in the region.

"But as of right now, we're getting poisoned," she said, referring to a projected rise in methylmercury levels in nearby waters caused by the Muskrat Falls project a project she tried, in vain to stop.

"They can't live the way we lived," she said.

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