The growing risks of extremism faced by parliamentarians has been a concern at the highest levels of the federal government for years.Ī 2019 Privy Council Office memo prepared for the prime minister noted the “increased assertiveness” of various ideologically motivated violent extremists. “They’re trying to find a revolution - and doing so in ways that are just kind of fundamentally at odds with our democratic system.”ġ:03 Freeland, Trudeau condemn harassment she faced in Alberta “People aren’t trying to find policy solutions,” she said. You want to throw them in jail or throw rocks at them or lock them up, as the chant has it,” Carvin said.ĭescribing it as a relatively new phenomenon in modern Canadian politics, Carvin spoke of a kind of “anti-politics,” one that rejects democratic institutions, processes and attitudes. “If you politically disagree with someone now, you don’t want to challenge them to a policy debate or propose a policy solution. “There seems to be an increased permission to hate,” said Stephanie Carvin, a former CSIS analyst who now teaches at Carleton University. That spike has intelligence experts concerned.
Speaking on background, one government official said there’s no question that last year’s convoy protests “supercharged” the threats their office faced, both in number and in the degree to which they threatened violence. Similarly, ITAC has concluded that the threat of ideologically motivated violent extremism has “overtaken” that of religiously motivated violent extremism in Canada. “There’s no guarantee that people will move across the spectrum, but I think there’s the real possibility that they will if something isn’t done about it.”Īs Global News has previously reported, CSIS now devotes nearly as much attention to ideologically motivated violent extremism - a broad term used by the agency, which includes far-right, anti-government and gender-based violence - as it does to religiously motivated violent extremism (RMVE). “There’s a spectrum here, going from people who are just fundamentally unhappy to people who actually detonate bombs,” Fadden said.
#Mps security torrent
The incidents are all documented in dozens of internal threat assessments prepared for senior federal government leaders and obtained by Global News through an access-to-information request.Īlthough they are heavily redacted, the documents provide a glimpse into a chilling trend, with elected officials facing a torrent of “violent rhetoric and intimidation tactics,” fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, extremist ideologies, and a tangled web of conspiracy theories.Īltogether, the reports analyzed threats against a total of 39 MPs, including Trudeau, Joly, Poilievre, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Defence Minister Anita Anand and 28 other cabinet ministers.Īmong those making the threats are “xenophobic extremists,” along with “radical libertarians, neo-Nazis, incels and other individuals who justify political violence in support of their ideologies,” according to ITAC’s analysis. In one incident, an Instagram user replied to a post by the minister and threatened to shoot him.Īnd in early 2022, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre - then still vying to lead his party - was among several MPs “targeted by online hate speech and threats” during the convoy protests that choked Ottawa’s downtown core for weeks and spawned blockades across the country. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and his family have also been targeted by several online threats, linked to the federal government’s push to strengthen gun control. The threat called for the named politicians to be executed for treason, claiming that the Canadian government had been “hijacked” by the World Economic Forum. In March 2022, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly was one of several Canadian officials named in an online threat posted to the far-right social network Gab. 3:02 Canadian government officials facing surge of violent threats
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