The abuse Catherine McKenna receives on Twitter exploded the day the carbon tax started
Catherine McKenna, Canada's Minister of Environment and Climate Change speaks during an event in Toronto, Ont., on Aug. 27, 2019. Photo by Cole Burston
By Fatima Syed
Three days after the election, a blown-up photo of Catherine McKenna on the front window of her campaign office was defaced with a vulgar four-letter slur painted in deep red letters.
The Ottawa Centre MP, who served as environment minister for the last four years, was speechless in her reaction to seeing “c--t” written over her face, but wasn’t surprised,
"It's the same as the trolls on Twitter. It needs to stop,” McKenna told reporters Thursday, six weeks after she had to employ security personnel after a passerby in a car attacked her and her children outside a movie theatre by yelling “F*** you, Climate Barbie.”
McKenna has spoken publicly time and again in recent months about the intensity of her social media engagement — so much so that it prompted one climate scientist to explore what was happening more closely.
A data analysis by Conor Anderson, a PhD candidate in the Climate Lab at the University of Toronto, found that replies to McKenna’s tweets have intensified significantly — in both their level of frequency and in offensive nature — since April 1, 2019, the day the federal carbon tax took effect in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick.
That day was also the day the largest volume of tweets were sent her way in her four-year tenure.
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