‘Violent and grotesque’: Man arrested for allegedly harassing, threatening Minister Nahanni Fontaine

A man is being accused of threatening and harassing a prominent Manitoba politician.

The Winnipeg Police Service says between July and September of last year, a politician received multiple letters – from an unknown person – containing racist comments and a threat of violence.

That politician has been identified as Minister of Families Nahanni Fontaine.

On Saturday, a 72-year-old man was taken into custody at a northwest Winnipeg home. He is facing charges of criminal harassment and uttering threats. He has since been released, and the investigation is ongoing.

“The messaging was really quite vile, and I realized, ‘Oh, these aren’t going to be good,’ so I went with my executive assistant, and we opened them one by one and read them; they were pretty violent and grotesque,” said Fontaine.

This isn’t the first time Fontaine has been the focus of harassment from the public; her constituency office was firebombed last year. She says hateful messages are nothing new.

“I get DMs regularly, and let me just say this, it is 99 per cent from men. I get DMs regularly calling me an (expletive), I get DMs calling me squaw. It is just something that has just, in its level of intensity, grown exponentially since COVID,” Fontaine explained.

She says the violent language used in this most recent incident was what led her advisors to push her to contact the police.

“I think that those letters, those were particularly violent, and I think they were shocking to read, but in the moment, what I was thinking was, this is a reflection of the violence that’s perpetrated and levelled towards Indigenous women,” said Fontaine.