Senators say they have been threatened over carbon pricing bill for farmers – National | Globalnews.ca

Two members of the Independent Senators Group say police and parliamentary security are investigating a threat that forced one of them to leave his home last weekend after a social media post criticized members of the chamber. high for his position on a carbon pricing bill for farmers.

Quebec Senator Raymonde Saint-Germain and Ontario Senator Bernadette Clement also accused members of the Senate Conservative caucus of “physical and verbal intimidation” on the Senate floor on November 9, and later shared a post on social media which they say led to online harassment. .

“I think it’s a wake-up call for our democracy,” Saint-Germain, leader of the Independent Senators Group, said in an interview with The Canadian Press on Wednesday.

Clement said he fled his home in Cornwall, Ont., about 100 kilometers southeast of Ottawa, last weekend after his office received a phone call from “a very angry man (who) said he was coming to my house.” ”.

Clement said he first called the Parliamentary Protective Service, who told him he needed to call Cornwall Police.

“Both bodies told me: ‘No, we are going to follow the protocol. This is what you do,” he said.

She was asked to locate the Parliament-issued panic button, which she said she had left in her Ottawa apartment because she always feels safe in Cornwall. When she hesitated to be concerned about his threat, they urged her to take it seriously, she said.

“Overall, I feel like I’m home and safe, but then they said, ‘Listen, you’re not,’” Clement said.

He said he went to his apartment in downtown Ottawa, which he uses during Senate sessions. He said that he has his own security system of his.

Chad Maxwell, Field Operations Inspector for the Cornwall Police Service, confirmed on Wednesday that they are investigating.

“The Cornwall Police Service is aware of the current situation with Senator Bernadette Clement and has been in communication with the Parliamentary Protective Service,” Maxwell said.

“These threats and online harassment are unacceptable and the police take them very seriously.”

Clement and Saint-Germain, both appointed to the Senate on the advice of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said it all started after Clement proposed postponing debate on Bill C-234. The private member’s bill seeks a carbon price exemption for propane and natural gas used by farmers to heat farm buildings and dry grain.

Introduced by Conservative MP Ben Lobb in 2022, the bill was passed by the House of Commons with support from all parties except the Liberals.

There remains a stage of debate before a final vote in the Senate can make it law.

The bill received little attention in its early stages, but has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks, particularly after the Liberals decided to exempt home heating oil from the carbon price for three years. They said this was to give people more time and money to replace oil boilers with electric heat pumps.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has launched a full-scale effort to get the bill passed as part of his “reduce the tax” campaign against carbon prices, and has accused the ruling Liberals of trying to prevent it. the bill is approved.

That accusation took on angrier tones on Nov. 9, when the bill was debated again in the Senate.

An amendment was introduced that Conservative senators considered frivolous and designed to force the bill to be sent back to the House of Commons, where the government could prevent it from coming to another vote.

Clement, who was not behind the amendment, proposed postponing debate because he said some senators were not present to talk about it that day.

That’s when things got ugly, he said.

“After violently throwing his earpiece, the Opposition Leader stood in front of Senator Clement and me as we sat at our desks, yelling at us and berating us for proposing this routine motion that would cause the debate to resume the following week, when we returned Saint said. -Germain said in the Senate on Tuesday night when raising a question of privilege on the matter.

Before the question of privilege was raised, Sen. Don Plett, who leads the conservative caucus in the Senate, spoke on the floor Tuesday about his role in the heated debate.

No one is “very happy with what happened on (November 9) and we all have our reasons,” he said.

He said he didn’t “think I had behaved unprofessionally, but I got angry.”

“I don’t like being called a ‘thug,’” he added. “I don’t like being a bully either, but I am passionate. I am passionate and dedicated to what I believe. I will never apologize for that. “I will fight hard for my cause and my party, but I want to do it in a respectful way, comrades, and if I didn’t do it on (November 9), that is not acceptable.”

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Several senators spoke out in support of Saint-Germain and Clément, agreeing that the behavior they witnessed was unacceptable. Senator Renee Dupuis said Plett’s behavior qualified as “harassment and intimidation.”

Plett did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Sen. David Wells, another conservative senator, raised a separate point of privilege Tuesday accusing Sen. Lucie Moncion of calling him a bully, and said the context around what happened is important.

He said some anger arose from the belief that there was a conspiracy to carry out government orders.

Clement and Saint-Germain, however, say the intimidation and harassment did not end on the Senate floor.

They pointed to a post by Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, a week after the adjournment debacle.

The post included a graphic with photos of Clement and Quebec Senator Chantal Petitclerc, along with their contact information and words encouraging people to call them to ask why they were shutting down debate on the bill. The publication was shared by several senators.

Petitclerc, Clement and Saint-Germain said the graphic looked like a “most wanted poster.”

Both Petitclerc and Clement said they received a barrage of disturbing phone calls. Clement described the comments received online as racist and misogynistic. There was also the threatening call that led Clement to leave his house.

Several senators referred to the social media post as “doxxing,” which generally refers to sharing someone’s personal identifiers and contact information on the Internet without their consent, often inviting backlash.

But this “certainly wasn’t nonsense,” conservative Sen. Denise Batters, who shared Scheer’s post about X, said Tuesday on the Senate floor.

“The post that was published did not contain anyone’s personal emails or phone numbers,” he said.

“The emails and phone numbers in that (post) are from the offices of those two senators in particular: the emails and phone numbers from their offices in the Senate. I certainly in no way intended to harass anyone or provide any venue to do something like that.”

When asked about Scheer’s post about the senators, Conservative Party spokesman Sebastian Skamski said it was not a wanted poster. He repeated accusations against Clement that she was simply following the government’s orders.

“While millions of Canadians are forced to use food banks, this so-called ‘independent’ senator, who ran in numerous elections as a Liberal and was appointed to the Senate by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is simply fulfilling his mandate as punish Canadians. to the farmers and families they feed with an expensive carbon tax,” Skamski said.

Clement ran for the Liberals in the 2011 and 2015 federal elections, but lost both times.

He said he was not working for the government at all, had not spoken to any cabinet ministers about the bill and had, in fact, voted for it when it came to the Senate from committee last month.

He said he has not yet decided how he plans to vote on the final bill.

—With files from Liam Fox