Threats of political violence rose rapidly through the Trudeau years, new data shows
Catherine McKenna noticed the first serious wave of threats aimed at her in 2018, on the same day the Trudeau government’s carbon-tax-and-rebate policy went into effect.
She was then the environment minister in former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet and became the lightning rod for opponents of the policy.
“Pretty quickly, things got really weird,” McKenna, who left politics after the 2019 election, said in a recent interview.
The abuse and threats first started online.
“So you would have a clip … then other people would play into it. The algorithms would amplify it,” McKenna said. “You would have bots and trolls pushing it out.”
But then, the online threats moved to the very real world.
“That was when it really became problematic, where people thought it was OK to harass me, harass me when I was out with my kids.”
Now, new data has recently been made available from the Privy Council Office (PCO) that puts some hard numbers on the trend of threats of political violence made against Trudeau and his cabinet from 2019 to the middle of 2024.
The PCO — the department that supports the work of the Prime Minister’s Office — began compiling data in 2018 through a PCO unit called the Crisis Management Cell (CMC).
The CMC tracked only a handful of threats in 2019 but through two elections, the introduction of the carbon tax, the pandemic, vaccine mandates, the Freedom Convoy protest and rising concerns over inflation and affordability, the CMC saw threats to all ministers rise each year to total 269 in 2023. For the first half of 2024 alone there were 337 threats of various sorts targeted at Trudeau and his ministers.
The PCO has not yet published any data past July 2024 so, for example, there is no data yet to compare how Prime Minister Mark Carney and his ministers are faring versus Trudeau and his cabinet.
The PCO’s CMC unit also tracked death threats as a sub-set of all threats through that period from 2018 to 2014. That data set shows none in 2019, rising to 21 in 2020; peaking at 56 death threats in 2022 — the year that began with the Freedom Convoy occupying Parliament Hill for six weeks — but then tapering off in subsequent years. That said, in just the first half of 2024, the CMC tracked 26 death threats made against Trudeau and his cabinet.
Most — about two-thirds — of those death threats were aimed at Trudeau himself but from the five years between 2019 and 2024, nearly 30 other ministers were also targeted with death threats.
McKenna was a among a group that received multiple death threats, a group that included Chrystia Freeland, Carolyn Bennett, Randy Boissonnault, François-Philippe Champagne, Jean-Yves Duclos, Sean Fraser, Marc Garneau, Steven Guilbeault, Bill Morneau and Dan Vandal.
“At one point I ended up having RCMP not just at particular events, but around the clock,” said McKenna, who addresses some of these issues in her memoir, Run Like a Girl, to be published this fall.
The data set released by the PCO only tracks threats to cabinet ministers.
It did not, for example, track threats made to former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh who, at one point, was assigned round-the-clock RCMP protection out of concern for his safety. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has also spoken about increased threats to him and his family during the period the CMC was tracking increasing threats to the cabinet.
And, this week, The Canadian Press reported that an independent candidate, Sarah Spanier, in the federal byelection in Battle River-Crowfoot has suspended her door-knocking campaign after receiving death threats. That’s the byelection Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is contesting.
A 2023 threat assessment prepared by the PCO and released as a result of an access-to-information request made by The Hill Times newspaper said those making threats against the cabinet appeared to motivated by conspiracy theories and by grievances over the pandemic, immigration, gun control and LGBTQ2 issues.
The increasing incidences of threats aimed not just at the prime minister and his cabinet but also at all MPs and some candidates has prompted some current and former parliamentarians, like McKenna, to call for the creation of a protective services agency, separate from the RCMP and modelled on the U.S. Secret Service, an agency with the sole mission of protecting federal politicians facing threats no matter if they are on Parliament Hill or back in their ridings.
“It’s something that is really becoming a huge phenomena that we need to take seriously,” McKenna said.
A February 2024 RCMP briefing note prepared for a meeting of the deputy ministers’ protection committee — a note obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request — said that, at that time, an additional 235 officers were needed for what it calls “close protection officers” assigned to keep VIPs like the prime minister safe.
David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News
globalnews
