Decades after a PM got pied, the threat landscape in Canadian politics has changed – National

When Prime Minister Jean Chrétien got hit in the face with a pie 25 years ago, the only thing hurt was his pride.

A quarter-century later, Canada’s security landscape has changed radically. Threats of violence against politicians have become far more common. What seemed like a harmless prank then looks more like a warning now.

“There is this view that you’re a politician, it’s all fair game,” said Catherine McKenna — who was herself the target of multiple threats of violence while she served as a federal minister.

“We need people to go into politics and not feel threatened. It’s literally about the health of our democracy because if you want people to go into politics, you can’t expect that they’re going to put up with this and their families are going to put up with it.”

Documents released by the Privy Council Office show that the volume of threats made against the prime minister and cabinet ministers has exploded in recent years.

A chart shows that there 40 threats against the prime minister and his cabinet were recorded in 2021. That number rose to 91 in 2022, 236 in 2023 and 311 in 2024.

The PCO document reports that 11 threats specifically targeting then-prime minister Justin Trudeau were recorded in 2021. The following year saw 25 threats against the PM reported. In 2024, Trudeau was the target of 212 threats, the document shows.

Between 2021 and 2024, the Privy Council document shows that Trudeau was the subject of 90 threats of death. The document says the 2024 statistics cover the period between January 1 and July 17. 

While McKenna said most of the threats against her emerged online, she was famously singled out for very public abuse during her 2015 to 2021 cabinet career — once while walking with her children outside a movie theatre.

“It’s just happening all the time and at all levels,” she said. “I can’t talk to a politician without them giving me a story about what has happened, and often women, especially racialized, Indigenous members of the LGBTQ2+ community.

“You just don’t know … probably 99 per cent of (threats) are nothing. It just only takes one person … I don’t think you can fool around with this.”

The P.E.I. pie incident happened on Aug. 16, 2000, while Chrétien was visiting an agricultural exhibition in Charlottetown.

As the prime minister entered the building and began shaking hands with people, a man in the crowd went up to him and pushed what appeared to be a cream-topped pie into his face.

As a shocked-looking Chrétien peeled off the pie plate and wiped his face, the man — who had attempted to flee — was stopped by police.

While the RCMP acknowledged that the incident shouldn’t have happened, it wasn’t the first such security breach during Chrétien’s time as prime minister.

In 1996, Chrétien grabbed a protester by the chin and neck and pushed him aside during a National Flag of Canada Day event — the incident that later became known as the “Shawinigan Handshake.”

A year before, Chrétien’s wife Aline came face-to-face with an intruder who had managed to break into the prime minister’s official residence in Ottawa armed with a knife.

Michele Paradis, the RCMP assistant commissioner in charge of protective policing, said police have to strike a “difficult balance” between keeping officials safe and allowing them access to the public.

“Because, really, if MPs, ministers of the Crown are not going out to meet with their constituents, that has an impact on our very democracy,” she said.

“My role is to make sure that our members and our principals are equipped with not only the physical tools to stop that, but also the mental acuity to be able to say something is not right,” Paradis said, adding that Mounties were quick to bring down someone who got too close to Trudeau at a parade in Montreal in 2019.

Paradis said the threat landscape has calmed down somewhat since the recent change of government.

If an official is threatened online, she said, Mounties will pay the person levying the threat a visit to determine whether they have the capacity to act on it, or if there is a mental health issue at play.

Paradis said the RCMP works with government officials, the House of Commons, constituency offices and security officers for various ministers to complete risk assessments.

“I think we’ve got a better sense of the picture of what’s going on,” Paradis said.

There have been several recent efforts to boost security measures for elected officials.

In 2024, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme asked the government to consider drafting a new law that would make it easier for police to pursue charges against people who threaten elected officials.

Around the same time, former public safety minister Marco Mendicino called for the creation of “protective zones” around political constituency offices to shield members of Parliament and their staff.

McKenna said she’d like to see an independent protective service created specifically to protect the prime minister and other federal officials. She said she’d like to see the government pass online harms legislation and hold social media companies accountable for the threats posted on their platforms.

McKenna said politicians also need to stop launching personal attacks on each other in order to generate social media clips.

“The problem is when they get personal, then it’s easy for people to basically dehumanize people,” she said. “It means that it’s OK to say terrible things about people and … it’s OK to go up to them and shout at them in the street and threaten them.”

When asked if more security measures are needed, Paradis said she and most police officers “work within what we have now” and adapt when things change.

Rob Huebert, a professor in the department of political science at the University of Calgary and director of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies, said the “near assassination” of U.S. President Donald Trump last year demonstrates that, even today, a determined assassin can still get close to a politician.

“On so many of these events, you can try to have metal detectors, you can try to have pre-screening, but it’s impossible to ever try to achieve 100 per cent security … the threat of an assault on a political leader is one of those constants,” he said. “The threat is always there.”

Huebert cited the example of the so-called “Toronto 18” terrorism plot, exposed in 2006, which was to involve a series of public attacks to convince the federal government to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

He said the fact that there have been no successful attacks on Canadian government officials could be the result of improved security — or it could be because no one else has tried.

Chris Mathers, a retired RCMP officer and president of a consulting and investigative firm, said the 2000 pie incident shows how Chrétien “didn’t stay in the box” — meaning he often strayed from the protective perimeter provided by his security detail.

Trudeau, he said, “always stayed in the box,” perhaps because, as the son of a prime minister, he grew up aware of threats against politicians.

“If you stay in the box, there’s a lot less chance that you’re going to be confronted by somebody with a pie or a knife or a gun or a bomb,” Mathers said.

Mathers said “the world is changing” and that people are now “a lot more aggressive and will do and say things that they wouldn’t in the past.”

“The problem is that we’ve started to degrade into a very permissive society and inappropriate behaviours are almost considered to be courageous in some areas,” he said. “So yes, security around public figures has increased, just as a result of the changing social environment.”

— With files from Jim Bronskill