Radio-Canada journalists Alain Gravel and Marie-Maude Denis are pictured in 2012.TOM SANDLER FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
The CBC is trying to block the release of warrants that allowed the Quebec provincial police to peer into the phone records of a number of journalists in 2014, marking a rare occasion in which a media organization is opposing transparency in judicial proceedings.
In a motion filed in the Quebec Court last month, the federal Crown corporation argued that unsealing the warrants could expose the confidential sources of three CBC journalists, who were targeted by the Sûreté du Québec's (SQ) investigation into alleged leaks to the media.
The motion pits the CBC against another media group, Montreal newspaper La Presse, which had two of its own reporters fall under the scope of the same SQ investigation. La Presse has called for the release of the warrants in order to subsequently ask the court to rule on their legality.
This week, La Presse won the right to have access to the warrants that were used in a separate investigation in which the Montreal Police Service obtained the phone records of two of its journalists in 2016.
Revelations about the SQ and Montreal Police Service investigations into journalists and their sources sparked a furor in Quebec last fall. In response, the Quebec government launched a public inquiry, which will hold its hearings into the matter later this year.
The CBC motion into the SQ warrants will be heard in the Quebec Court on Jan. 27. The lawyer for La Presse in the matter, Mark Bantey, said he was surprised by the CBC's efforts to keep the warrants out of the public's view.
"Normally, media organizations support the principle of openness in judicial proceedings and do everything in their power to have full access to court records," Mr. Bantey said in an interview.
"I understand they want to protect their sources, and we are willing to work with them on that front, but I don't understand why they want to completely block this from public view," he said.
In its motion, the CBC is arguing that its goal is to prevent the "release of sensitive information that would damage the freedom of the press."
"Given that journalistic investigations are at the heart of this matter, the [CBC and its journalists] have an interest in protecting not only their sources, but also the information that they obtained and the journalistic methods that they used," the CBC motion said.
According to the CBC, the same questions that are in front of the Quebec Court will also arise in the public inquiry, stating that the public inquiry would be a better forum to decide whether the warrants should be released or not.
In its motion, the CBC said that "even the partial" release of information contained in the SQ warrants could have negative impacts, calling for the documents to remain under seal "to guarantee the full protection of its journalists' sources." If the documents are eventually released, the CBC is asking the Quebec Court to redact all information "directly or indirectly related" to its journalists.
There are three Radio-Canada reporters whose phone records going back a number of years were obtained by the SQ in 2014: Alain Gravel, Marie-Maude Denis and Isabelle Richer. The three broke a number of stories that exposed widespread corruption and collusion on large construction projects in Quebec.
The reporting angered Michel Arsenault, the former head of the Quebec Federation of Labour, who feared that the journalists had been provided access to SQ wiretaps. In a letter to the province's public safety minister in 2013, Mr. Arsenault complained about alleged leaks from police to journalists, and the file was passed to the head of the SQ, which launched an investigation. The SQ has since shut down this investigation without laying any charges.