Following a phone meeting with the Minister of Forests, old-growth protesters publicly shared the minister’s home phone number which has resulted in her receiving harassing phone calls.
Katrine Conroy was asked in a news conference if her home phone number was shared with the public, and she said it has.
“It’s a very small group of people who are using this tactic and I don’t believe it’s a very positive tactic to use,” Conroy said.
“I think that you can you get you can deal with people in a lot better way and a lot more work can be done, and I’m going to continue to do the work we’re doing because I know how incredibly important it is to most people in this province.”
The phone number was shared on the Fairy Creek Blockade’s Facebook account after a phone meeting with Conroy.
The post asked for people to call Conroy’s personal number on behalf of Howard Breen, who claimed the number was shared without his knowledge.
Breen is on a hunger strike and says it will continue until he has a public meeting with the minister.
“If you wish to contact the minister do it in the way we were doing it before that point which was by email and through her constituency office number and the legislature,” Breen said.
Breen says the phone call was set up by another person so he does not have Conroy’s phone number, and he was not involved in the decision to share the personal phone number.
However, days earlier, Breen said activists were planning a “citizens’ arrest” of Conroy at an upcoming Council of Forest Industries conference in Vancouver.
Premier John Horgan could also be targeted as part of the group’s efforts to stop all old-growth logging, what they consider “crimes against humanity and nature,” he told The Canadian Press.
Breen has a long history of controversial protest tactics against elected officials.
He was one of three protesters charged with criminal mischief under $5,000 after he tried to block the Langford home of Premier John Horgan in 2020 in an attempt to make a so-called citizen’s arrest against him.
Horgan was forced to rush home from the provincial budget after his wife phoned terrified at protesters banging on the front door.
The charges were eventually stayed in exchange for Breen and others abiding by conditions not to contact or communicate with Horgan or attend his home.
Laura Brougham
