A Victoria city councillor who has received two death threats in recent weeks due to a perceived pro-development bias, is pushing back and says he will not tolerate increasingly aggressive communication in any form from city residents.
Jeremy Caradonna, in his first term as a city councillor, said the level of rhetoric and threat has escalated to the point he no longer feels safe.
“At this point, I’m just laying down the law with people and I am setting firm boundaries, and I just refuse to be one of these politicians that gets turned into a punching bag,” he said in an interview Monday. “I guess I cracked a little bit or I’ve snapped in that I’m just not willing to be bullied anymore and let it happen. I’m going to push back on people.”
Caradonna did that this past week in an email response to a James Bay resident.
While Caradonna did not find the email threatening, he did characterize it as combative, antagonistic, sarcastic, and aggressive and in the context of the threats he has received over his position on development in James Bay, decided enough was enough.
“In recent weeks I have been the target of two death threats against me, my wife, and our two daughters, both of which have shaken us up as a family,” Caradonna wrote in his email response to the James Bay resident. “This is apparently where we are at as a society — a situation in which some folks feel it is legitimate to threaten violence against elected officials who even contemplate supporting new rental housing in the neighbourhood.”
Caradonna said it is “totally legit to criticize me or council or hold us accountable. That’s what we expect. That’s normal, healthy, democratic. But to go beyond that into aggression and hostility and sarcasm and all this stuff, I think it’s damaging.”
“I ran to try to bring positive change to my community. It doesn’t mean that I am a legitimate target for hatred and threats,” he said.
To combat that, Caradonna has decided to respond and ask those weighing in to de-escalate their language and act in a respectful manner.
The death threats were passed on to both the city’s senior management and Victoria police.
A Victoria police spokesperson was not available Monday to comment on the situation.
Caradonna is certainly not alone in dealing with this kind of vitriol.
Examples of threats against politicians abound across the country, to the point where the federal government is working on measures to increase the safety of ministers and MPs.
For example, last year, federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland was verbally attacked at an event in Alberta, while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was pelted with gravel during a campaign stop in 2021.
Closer to home, Langford council launched a new social media policy in an attempt to curb an increasing number of toxic posts and comments and what the mayor called “thinly veiled death threats.” Mayor Scott Goodmanson said the threats will not be tolerated.
Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto said she’s not sure the level of threat is any worse, but she believes the isolation during the pandemic accelerated and intensified people’s comfort and ability to be anonymous.
“I think that did enable some people to perhaps be more thoughtless, less civil, more hurtful than they would otherwise be,” she said.
Alto, who has been a member of council for 12 years, said the level of civil discourse has declined, and she noted women who are elected to office have been targeted as long as she has been around.
“There has always been a degree of aggression towards women in positions of power, and that’s something you just had to deal with,” she said. “It’s a feature of the job.”
Caradonna said there are myriad reasons people are lashing out.
He said people are under a lot of pressure with big issues like the rapid pace of climate change, the housing crisis, unaffordability and inflation.
“All these sorts of things are coming to a head,” he said, noting one of his theories is when tough debates like missing-middle housing and densification come up it’s often just the canvas on which people project their anxieties about the bigger issues.
Alto’s way of dealing with it, as long as there is no immediate danger, is to try and show there’s another path and to establish a chamber where it is safe for people to exchange ideas. “We don’t have to agree with one another at all, but we do need to be civil, and we need to be respectful, and we need to be calm.”
She said she hopes the day never comes when municipal politicians require protection details. “The one thing that’s really unique and I think rewarding and wonderful about local government is that you are very connected to the community day-to-day,” she said.
“I would find [protection] really regretful.”
Caradonna said he expected there would be some abuse when he was elected.
He said before taking office he had spoken with former councillor Sharmarke Dubow, who told him he had been the subject of threats of violence and a lot of racist correspondence.
“I don’t get racist tirades, but I do get tirades and I would say a lot of it, in my experience, has to do with development and people who feel under assault in their comfortable, single-family-home lifestyle,” he said, noting many of them seem to take the idea of things like missing-middle housing as an affront to their human rights.
“Death threats are totally beyond the pale of acceptability and the law,” said Michael Prince, University of Victoria political science professor. “Such threats must be taken seriously of course; regrettably, they can have a profound impact on the person targeted and, by extension, their loved ones.
“Local representatives are lightning rods for all kinds of criticisms by residents — perhaps more so than elected officials from other levels of government due to their local proximity and visibility. Up to a point, and that point is before aggression and abuse, criticism is to be expected and is acceptable in democratic politics.”
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