Vancouver lawyer encourages Terrace, B.C. women to create record of police stops

A trip from Prince Rupert to Terrace for a berry festival took an unsettling turn for a woman and her friend along Yellowhead Highway 16. Symbia Barnaby said it happened around 5:30 p.m. close to the Shames Mountain entrance on July 23. “We had just come back from cultural duties. We had a tea with hereditary chiefs in Prince Rupert. We saw two police cars on the road … there wasn’t anybody in the middle of the road directing traffic, and I said to my friend ‘what do I do?’ and he said, ‘we’ll voluntarily stop and then we’ll ask what we should do’,” Barnaby says. An officer directed them to pull over. “We said ‘Hello, officer’ and we were trying to be cordial,” Barnaby said. “And he was like, ‘this is a mandatory breathalyzer stop.’” Barnaby said she was confused and wanted to know why. She works as the Indigenous practice advisor for the Family Support Institute in B.C., which supports Indigenous people with disabilities. She said she doesn’t drink alcohol and neither she nor her friend had had anything to drink. Her friend is autistic and a Gitxsan firekeeper and they are both respected in their community. She said he didn’t want to share his name because he is afraid of repercussions from the RCMP. “My friend extended his hand toward the officer to show he was being cordial, and tried to shake his hand … the police officer put his hand through the window, grabbed my friend’s hand and squeezed it really hard, and then started to pull it, as if he was going to pull him across my lap out the window,” Barnaby said. She described the incident as “very aggressive.” Knowing her friend is autistic, she took his hands and tried to help him self-regulate because they were both distraught. “To us, what do you see in the public? Indigenous people being brutalized by the police,” Barnaby said. The incident prompted Barnaby to make a post on Facebook, calling on residents of the Terrace and Prince Rupert areas to share if they’d experienced any similar incidents. She has since reached out to the RCMP Civilian Review and Complaints Commission (CRCC), a local MLA, and plans to contact the officer’s supervisor at the Terrace RCMP detachment. Since putting the call out on Facebook, dozens have commented, including Arlene Lincoln. Stopped for a breathalyzer test Lincoln, a Nisga’a woman from Lisims First Nation, said she filmed a traffic stop by the same officer with her cellphone. In the seven-minute video she shared with APTN, Lincoln repeatedly asked the Mountie for a business card. “So, you’re the one that’s been pulling people over,” she told him from the passenger seat. “That’s my job to pull people over,” he replied from outside the driver’s side window. Lincoln questioned why they were being stopped. And sounded irritated when she didn’t get an answer. “I’m not talking to you,” the officer replied, speaking to the driver instead. “I’m talking to you,” Lincoln interjected. “I need your card. Why the f*** are you doing this?” The Mountie asked the driver why he’s in the area, what he last had to eat or drink, and whether he’s had a cigarette. “Oh, my God, are you kidding me?” said Lincoln. “I didn’t know they have to ask you about cigarettes when they pull you over.” The Mountie then demanded the driver take a sobriety test. “You see that, Facebook world?” added Lincoln. “This is the guy that’s pulling everybody over.” The RCMP, however, say the officer is just doing his job. Staff-Sgt. Kris Clark, a senior media officer with the B.C. RCMP, said police across Canada have the power to impose mandatory alcohol screening on the roadside since alcohol-impaired laws were updated in 2018. “While I will not comment on the specific concerns of local residents,” Clark said in an email to APTN, “I would encourage anyone who has concerns about an officer’s conduct to report their concerns either by contacting the management of any RCMP detachment, or through the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission [CRCC] for the RCMP.” APTN is not naming the officer, a former special constable with the Vancouver Police Service, because he is not officially accused of or charged with any offence. Lawyer warned lawmakers in 2018 Lawyer Kyla Lee testified before a Parliamentary committee in 2018 about amended drinking and driving laws. Photo: Kyla Lee The complaints are of concern to Vancouver-based lawyer Kyla Lee, who has a large TikTok following for her online legal advice. Lee said it’s the kind of scenario she warned law-makers about when they were preparing to beef up Canada’s impaired driving laws in 2018. “I even gave the example in my testimony at the House of Commons of police parking outside the entrance to a reserve and testing people coming and going,” she told APTN. “If an officer is disproportionately using these powers against Indigenous people that is a problem.” Lee viewed Lincoln’s video at the request of APTN. “So far it looks like a routine traffic stop for sobriety,” she said. “Police do have the power to [do] random stops of any vehicle on the roadway to check sobriety. The questions he asked are screening questions because what he asked about can interfere with tests. “Police have also since 2018 had to power to do random breathalyzers without grounds.” @kylaleelawyer What do you need to do when pulled over by #police in Canada? The #law around your obligations at a #traffic stop is complex. Here are five things you need to know if you are ever pulledover. #kylalee #lawyer #dui #fyp #canadianlaw #bcpoli #cdnpoli #britishcolumbia #duilawyer ♬ original sound – Kyla Lee Multiple complaints launched Lincoln’s driver, as seen in the video, passed the breathalyzer, but was fined for speeding. Still, Barnaby said dozens of people have posted complaints about the same officer, and she noted she has gone further by also contacting the [CRCC], a local MLA, and intends to contact the officer’s supervisor at the Terrace RCMP detachment. The CRCC said for privacy reasons it can’t comment on complaints against a specific Mountie. But it did provide complaint statistics for the Terrace detachment. “Between April 1, 2025 and July 31, 2025, there were 10 complaints lodged for the Terrace and Prince Rupert RCMP detachments,” said a spokesperson in an email to APTN. Lee, meanwhile, said Barnaby and Lincoln are doing the right thing by documenting the alleged misuse of the law. “When the law was passed by Parliament in 2018 there were concerns that it would be [allegedly] abused exactly in this way,” she said. “We have started to see the manifestations of that in many cases now.” She noted, as well, that there is “no safeguard in the law to prevent biased policing” and very little “mechanism to discover it or deal with it since in many cases if the [sobriety] tests turn up nothing [then] no records are generated.” Lee encouraged the women to create a formal record of community members being stopped and the reasons why. “If they have the data to show disproportionate or biased policing that could go along way,” she said. Continue Reading