Memories of Hill security breaches past

I've been doing a little bit of archive searching and Googling around inbetween other tasks today, trying to determine Parliament Hill's scariest Scariest. Security. Breach. Ever.

In my time on the Hill, there's been that guy waving a little flag behind Mulroney at his portrait unveiling in 2002... and a few years before that, that other guy Chrétien grabbed by the throat at Flag Day celebrations -- you know, when le petit gars proclaimed "I took him out..." In retrospect, these seemed to me to be more embarassing than dangerous to our prime ministers past and present.

More serious were the mystery vehicles, although no serious harm was done in either case. The Hyundai that breached security by the East Block in 2003 felt a little scarier to me than the Jeep that drove right up under the Peace Tower in 1997, mostly because after 9/11 security had supposedly been tightened up as far as vehicular access was concerned. But the 2003 incident happened in late August, and if there's one place our elected officials aren't in late August, it's Parliament Hill.

The Greyhound Bus incident in April 1989 was before my time... but the live coverage of this strange and troubling hijacking helped make Don Newman the force he became for CBC Newsworld's live coverage of Parliament Hill, so it holds a special spot in this corner. Shots were fired in that case, so the potential for something Very Bad Indeed was real.

But nope, none of these seemed all that scary to me once I read about this:

Paul Joseph Chartier was a mentally unbalanced individual who came to believe that the government was the source of his problems and that politicians were all too rich and greedy. On May 18, 1966 he came to Ottawa determined to throw some kind of bomb made from dynamite from the House of Commons' Gallery. He accidentally blew himself up in a Centre Block men's room first. He was the only person who died that day, although the dynamite significantly damaged the bathroom. The huge wooden door apparently absorbed and contained much of the force of the blast.

Ron Wood's blog contains a rather grisly account of his eyewitness experience that day, as a young reporter on the Hill.

Somehow, scholar and enthusiast of Canadian politics that I am, I missed ever learning about this, until today. If we're talking about serious threats to Members' safety, surely this was the closest anyone ever came to physical harm.

At least the Greenpeace gang only brought banners.