Just to be crystal clear : This email was sent me last year & @OttawaPolice did not deem it criminal.
If the Ottawa police are charging JJ Clarke with multiple counts of online stalking & harassment AND seized all his firearms, they have pretty damning evidence!
I appreciate everyone's kindness here but to reiterate, I'm using this concrete threat as an example of how the threshold for criminal harassment in Canada is HIGH. So, for JJ Clarke to have been charged with SEVEN counts, means there was A LOT of very credible evidence.
But yes, Ottawa Police are not my friend and I could write a whole other book on my experiences of reporting online harassment to police.
Please trust me when I say that if Ottawa Police had enough evidence to charge 'Ottawa's favourite weatherman', then the evidence was damning
Also, this is absolutely shameful reporting by the Ottawa Citizen.
"Ottawa's favourite weatherman" is not a fact.
I shouldn't be surprised, though. @OttawaCitizen gave convicted killer Basil Borutski a platform to blame women for causing him to commit a triple femicide.
Canadians love to get outraged about American white men who go on rampages, and then bend over backwards to defend our own white men who are accused, in this case, of threatening the lives of women ON CAMERA, to a degree where cops took away his guns.
I am often privately called upon by military members, campus employees, government officials, etc. to go public with something because it's "safer" for me.
I cannot emphasize enough how painfully inaccurate that assumption is.
Why ask someone who is entirely self-employed with no team, no budget & no infrastructure, to take one for the team while you have a permanent job, health insurance, paid holidays & a union? Not to mention public support on your side.
Are there advantages to being an underdog? Yes!
I can, & do, lecture on the benefits of going hard in the paint because there's no bureaucracy to hold you back.
But the idea that people like me have "nothing to lose" while we're getting 1000s of death threats is insulting.
*Stares in 2015 me who was averaging about a hundred threats a day and who couldn't speak in public without a police escort because I had spoken about sexual harassment at the Royal Military College*