Crowd-friendly Trudeau poses security challenge
Mountie detail faces shift from Harper’s style
OTTAWA — A beaming Justin Trudeau works the admiring crowd. People push forward, trying to shake hands or share hugs with the country’s dashing new leader.
Trudeau’s RCMP security detail watches for anything unusual, stone-faced amid all the happy expressions. Someone’s hands at their sides. A sudden movement forward. Something that doesn’t fit the picture.
Protecting any prime minister from potential harm is a challenge. But Trudeau told his first postelection news conference this week that his Mountie bodyguards will have to give him time and space to engage with ordinary people.
“I have an approach that is open and needs a level of engagement with Canadians and a presence,” he told reporters. “I hope and count on continuing the effort.”
That means the complex, delicate choreography that goes into protecting a prime minister without cutting off what most successful politicians love to do — press the flesh with voters — will have to change and adapt from the more controlled style of Stephen Harper.
The morning after he won the election, Trudeau strolled through a Montreal subway station, where he was mobbed by well-wishers. Later that day, he was swarmed as he walked from Parliament Hill to a news conference across the street.
“He will be the type of person who will decide to go for a walk and shake hands with the public,” says Dan Boehner, a private security adviser during Trudeau’s election campaign and former officer-in-charge of the RCMP’s prime minister protection detail for prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. “If it’s unannounced and he’s just meeting the general population ... when it’s time to stop, is he wise enough? I think he is. (He knows he) can only go so far with it. He’s not a stupid man ... He’s a married man with children and very close to his family.”
When a leader makes an unannounced detour in his movements to greet people or visit a site, odds are there’s no one threatening — or armed — in the vicinity, says Boehner.
“If you’re not in a society where everyone’s carrying a gun, what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? They might become insulting, they might try to approach. But really, is there a threat there?”
On the other hand, planned and announced events, especially in public, can attract potential threats.
If the RCMP threat assessment for an event points to potential trouble, “that’s a different situation where a leader has to take the advice of the security officer,” says Boehner. “I used to tell (frontline) people, ‘you’ve got to be ready to put your job on the line’ to get the leader to understand the situation.
Trudeau and his family got a scare in August 2014, when a drunken 19-year-old man mistakenly wandered into the politician’s home in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park neighbourhood.
Trudeau wasn’t home, but his wife, Sophie Grégoire, and their three small children were sleeping inside.
No charges were laid in the incident. The RCMP, who do not offer personal protection to opposition party leaders, completed a confidential threat assessment for Trudeau, however.