Hypotheses pointed to a terrorist attack on the Canada-US border on Wednesday, but the explosion ultimately turned out to be an accident. However, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, did not wait a second, Wednesday afternoon, during question period, to describe the event as a “terrorist attack” — three times rather than ‘a.
In a press briefing in Toronto on Thursday morning, the leader ardently defended himself, justifying that he had based himself on information circulating in the media.
“I said yesterday that there had been media reports [comme quoi] there was an incident that was presumed to be terrorist that took place on our border,” he told reporters.
The leader did not use the term “alleged” in his question in the House on Wednesday.
“We have just heard media reports of a terrorist attack on the Niagara border. There are maybe two people who are dead and a third who is injured. Can the Prime Minister give us information on this terrorist attack,” he declared in the House of Commons, in French, then in English.
He then sharply criticized the English network CTV, which he accused of having misled him. “CTV reported that the Canadian government assumed the incident was terrorist,” he said.
The television network had reported that, according to its sources, Canadian government officials initially considered the explosion of a vehicle on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls on Wednesday to be linked to terrorism. The news and the post on the X network were published around 2:39 p.m.
However, Mr. Poilievre’s statement in the House was made around 2:25 p.m. — about ten minutes before the publication of the CTV report.
On Wednesday afternoon, US channel Fox News was among the first news networks to claim that the explosion was the result of an attempted terrorist attack with a vehicle containing “a lot of explosives”, while Reuters , citing unnamed Canadian officials, pointed the finger at a reckless driver.
“Very irresponsible” behavior
The Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Karina Gould, accused Mr. Poilievre at a press briefing on Thursday of not “valuing the intelligence of Canadians” and of “not respecting the media”.
“That’s not what [doit faire] a leader. […] This is very irresponsible. It’s playing with the emotions and security of Canadians,” criticized Mr.me Gould. The latter emphasizes that unfounded statements about terrorist acts are all the more dangerous in a tense global context and with the rise of anti-Semitism in the country.
On Thursday, Mr. Poilievre did not apologize and did not explicitly correct his statement made in the House the day before.
Let us also recall that the leader of the opposition had, in October, criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for having “amplified disinformation” on the subject of the rocket attack on the Al-Ali hospital in Gaza.
Some time after the explosion, Wednesday, the Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc was cautious and did not want to give more details on the circumstances surrounding the event, in particular on the origin of the vehicle and on the thesis of a terrorist attack.
The Bloc Québécois highlighted the conservative leader’s lack of caution Thursday morning.
“My immediate and cautious reaction yesterday, following the event at the Ontario/USA border. Cautious because we didn’t know. This morning, everything suggests that it was not an attack. Another leader spoke too soon about terrorism to make political points,” wrote the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, on X.