Toews reportedly set to retire

OTTAWA — Word was spreading Tuesday night in Ottawa and Winnipeg that Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews is about to retire.

Some sources said Toews, 60, would retire as early as Wednesday. Others said it will happen, just not Wednesday.

Toews’s office would not comment officially on the reports Tuesday night, but a source said suggestions Toews is retiring Wednesday are not “completely correct.”

Toews is in Alberta, “reinforcing the government’s commitment to respond to the flood that has affected tens of thousands of Albertans,” his spokesman Julie Carmichael said in an email.

Reports that Toews was set to leave have circulated from time to time for years. At one point, he was being vetted as a possible appointment to the judiciary in Manitoba, but sources said Prime Minister Stephen Harper was not comfortable appointing a cabinet minister directly to the bench.

Toews has been the MP for Manitoba’s Provencher riding since 2000. He was appointed to cabinet when the Conservative party took power in 2006, first as minister of justice, then as president of the Treasury Board. He was switched into Public Safety in 2010 where he has remained ever since. He has had his share of trouble in the last few years, particularly in the winter of 2012, when he told a Liberal MP not supporting the government’s new Internet spying bill he was akin to siding with pedophiles. The comment led to an Internet war against Toews, including an anonymous Twitter account which made public details of Toews’s divorce file. The account was later traced to a Liberal staffer who then resigned.

There was also a Twitter hashtag called #tellviceverything which saw thousands of Canadians protest the bill by tweeting mundane details of their lives.