Photo: The Canadian Press Patrick McDonnell, then a gun sergeant, brings the knife out of the House of Commons after the House of Commons climbed Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, December 13, 2018. The House sergeant says he was “surprised” how the almost daily harassment of MPs and officials was allowed to continue under the jurisdiction of the Ottawa police during the “convoy of freedom”. THE CANADIAN PRESS / Justin Tang The House of Commons sergeant says he was “surprised” by how Ottawa police allowed parliamentarians and staff to continue harassing anti-COVID-19 restrictions in the capital earlier this year. Patrick McDonnell, who works closely with the head of the Parliamentary Protection Service, told a committee today that lawmakers and their staff were being harassed almost daily on Wellington Street in central Ottawa, which is under local police jurisdiction. The committee is considering extending jurisdiction over the operational security of the enclosure around Parliament Hill to include sections of Wellington Street, where vehicles were parked for three weeks during Freedom Convoy and Sparks Street, which includes a pedestrian mall. McDonell says there was a police car “very close in sight” to the events he described and that incidents were reported to Ottawa police “every day”. He says a person would block the cars of some workers as they arrived at a nearby car park and if the employee was a woman, the person would “hit his car” before leaving. McDonell also says a female employee was arrested by a man who tried to throw something at her that looked like a bag of human feces before another employee arrived and pushed the man to the ground.
