Threats Against MPs are Completely Out of Hand

Last week, the House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee (PROC) began reviewing the House’s policy on workplace harassment and violence prevention. This, in years’ past, would register as an innocuous meeting not worthy of generating even a small story in the back of a paper or deep in a website. That’s not what happened, as the PROC Committee heard witness after witness, frequently MPs, recount in excruciating detail the extreme level of harassment, threats of violence and death threats they have been receiving or have observed. This is not normal nor acceptable.

Patrick McDonell, the current Sergeant-at-Arms and Corporate Security Officer of the House of Commons, perhaps provided the most succinct sentence possible to explain what’s happening: “In 2019 there was approximately eight files we opened up on threat behaviours, either direct or indirect threat towards an MP, and in 2023 there was 530 files opened.” The news headlines are a sad collection of where our political discourse has steered towards: MPs advised to lock office doors, avoid meetings as death threats skyrocketreads a National Post article; Harassment of MPs spiked almost 800% in 5 years, says House sergeant-at-armsreads a CBC article.

This is an astonishingly depressing state of affairs, one that a number of MPs and other public servants have expressed serious concerns about over the last few years. It’s been a sort of unspoken feeling for a while now but hearing the Sergeant-at-Arms reveal the massive increase in threats and harassment is very troubling.

When asked about harassment online, the Sergeant-at-Arms said this: “it's come to the point where we're bulk filing the harassment of MPs online, as there's just so much of it. The social media platforms are, one, either not taking our call or two, taking our call and saying, ‘Yes, we'll look into it,’ and it ends there.” The very nature of social media has made it easier to attack, harass, and threaten people, where users can hide behind anonymity. And, because of the work they do trying to represent their constituents, MPs are easy targets for this sort of behaviour. We’ve known for a long time that social media trades on engagement, and rage is often the easiest tool to keep people engaged. But it comes at a massive cost that we still aren’t fully prepared to deal with.

This isn’t a partisan issue, but an issue of how we engage with each other. During that particular PROC Committee meeting, many of the witnesses appearing were woman MPs. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner and NDP MP Lyndsay Mathyssen have both stated they have received death threats. Liberal MP Pam Damoff, who recently decided not to run again citing harassment, said “the level of threats and misogyny I am subject to both online and in person are such that I often fear going out in public, and that is not a sustainable and healthy way to live.” My colleague and friend Charlie Angus has had to have the OPP come and answer phone calls in his constituency office at one point because he was receiving a stream of threats over a 24-hour period.

And while I have not spoken much about this publicly, I’ve personally worked with the Sergeant-At-Arms office after receiving threats in recent months, which is not something I’ve actively had to do in my almost 16 years as an MP. There have of course been instances where I’d receive angry phone calls (the very nature of politics means you aren’t going to make everyone happy all of the time) but nothing to the level that I or my staff have had to be concerned about personal safety until recently. As a result a formal complaint was filed with the police and charges laid, not something I considered lightly, but leaving my staff or myself open to active death threats & ongoing harassment isn’t an option.

There are enormous costs to this unacceptable growth in intimidation and abuse, both financially, and far more importantly, to our democracy. RCMP costs to protect MPs excluding the Prime Minister have increased to $1.8 million in fiscal year 22/23 and we are on track to double those expenditures in 23/24. That’s a significant increase. But what’s more significant are the number of people who will step away from even attempting to run for office. Anyone who doesn’t feel like they can endure a torrent of vitriol may decide this job isn’t worth it. That means the people who may be more likely to attract those threats (women, First Nations people, youth, LBTQ+ people, etc.) will be less inclined to run for elected office, and that does severe damage to representative democracy.

We have recently seen that this isn’t just a growing problem here in Canada, but to countries across the globe as well. It’s obvious we need to do a better job of turning down the heat both on social media and in the political sphere, or we risk alienating the next generation of leaders from public service.