Government documents reveal barrage of threats against Mark Carney

The documents show that Carney and his family became targets almost as soon as he took over from Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister in March 2025.

Several of the threats recorded against Carney also targeted other cabinet ministers, including Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, Justice Minister Sean Fraser and former transport minister Chrystia Freeland. 

In total, Carney is listed as a target of 79 threats over the 110 days after he became Liberal leader and prime minister. Twelve of those threats are listed as “direct,” while the rest are labelled “indirect.” 

The documents also show that Trudeau faced a barrage of threats over his final three years as prime minister. During that time, protests regularly featured “F—- Trudeau” flags and sometimes included public calls for his execution. 

The Prime Minister’s Office — which stopped releasing the addresses of the prime minister’s public events in advance over security concerns before Carney took office — declined to comment when asked this week about the threats. 

Representatives of the RCMP and Privy Council Office — the government department that supports the prime minister and produced the new documents — did not immediately respond to questions from the Star on Friday. 

Stephanie Carvin, a national security expert and associate professor at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, said it is now an “unfortunate reality” that threats — even if they’re indirect or spread online — are a feature of modern political culture. Examples include assassination attempts against U.S. President Donald Trump, and the killings of politicians in the U.S., United Kingdom and Japan. 

Carvin attributed this to a “breakdown” in how policies and public decisions are seen less as legitimate disagreements and more as shifts that fundamentally risk the way people see themselves or their economic security. 

“We’ve seen politics being portrayed as … life and death struggle,” she said. “It is hard to put that level of political violence — direct or indirect — back in the bottle.”

In recent years, several MPs have expressed fear for their own safety or that of their families. Death threats have become a repeated occurrence for some, and the Star has reported how some politicians have obtained “panic buttons” to call authorities if they’re in trouble, and increased security systems at their homes and offices.

In 2024, Trudeau’s national security adviser warned that the RCMP’s personal protective service faced “unsustainable pressure” amid a surge of threats against public figures. The internal briefing note which included that warning noted that the top security official on Parliament Hill had recorded a spike in “threat-related contacts” against MPs from 29 in 2019 to 231 in 2023. 

That year, two people were charged with threatened Thornhill MP Melissa Lantsman, the deputy Conservative leader. Former Liberal cabinet minister Marco Mendicino — who faced threats alongside Carney, according to the recently released list — said in 2024 that he had faced multiple death threats. In an incident captured on video, Mendicino was confronted by a group of people in downtown Ottawa that included a man who spat in his face.

Other incidents have included the arrest of a man after a fire was deliberately set at the office of Mississauga Liberal MP Peter Fonseca, and allegations that somebody set Yukon MP Brendan Hanley’s garage on fire. Ahead of the last federal election, Oakville MP Pam Damoff said she would not seek re-election because politics had become so “toxic” and “hyperpartisan” that she was afraid to appear in public. 

During last year’s general election campaign, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh revealed that a credible death threat meant that he required personal security to guard him and his family, even at a hospital while his wife was giving birth to their second child. 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has also spoken about threats against his family. In 2022, government officials discussed the need for security upgrades at Stornoway, the publicly owned residence for Canada’s official opposition leader. 

In an email Friday, RCMP spokesperson Marie-Eve Breton said threats are “always taken seriously” even while they are “often non-criminal, indirect and/or non-credible in nature.”

Breton added that the prime minister, cabinet ministers and MPs “have been and continue to be subjected to harassment, threats, or other forms of intimidation” in a “constantly” changing security environment.