Donald Laird’s Violent Harassment Continues to Thwart Alberta’s Legal System

[Editor’s note: This article contains violent, hateful language.]

Alberta provincial court Judge Ferne LeReverend fully agreed with the special prosecutor.

For a democracy to function, politicians must be protected from the growing threat of harassment and intimidation. No politician should be terrorized into silence or into quitting public office.

LeReverend also agreed this case required a prison sentence that would deter Donald Laird and others who might seek to imitate his behaviour.

Laird, a 63-year-old itinerant oilfield and logging industry worker, has a long, well-documented history of harassing, intimidating and outright terrorizing the people he virulently hates and wants to silence — most particularly racialized people including Muslims, politicians and academics.

But Laird is highly intelligent and articulate. And for years, he has successfully thwarted several attempts by Alberta’s legal system to deter him from engaging in stochastic terrorism, a form of political violence sparked by hostile public rhetoric.

Fear ‘beyond words’

A death threat by Laird to Alberta NDP MLA Marlin Schmidt in July 2020 was so graphic and violent that Schmidt, in his victim impact statement, said he needed thousands of dollars of private counselling and still fears for his life.

“The fear and anxiety this email has instilled in me are beyond words,” Schmidt said in his statement, which he read into the court record at Laird’s sentencing on Monday.

“Each day, I am overwhelmed by the dread of potentially meeting a fate similar to other public figures who have been tragically attacked, such as congresswoman Gabby Giffords of Arizona and British MP Jo Cox. This constant worry has become a part of my daily life.”

But as Schmidt, his partner and several of his office staff watched in an Edmonton courtroom, the judge effectively imposed a five-day jail sentence on Laird.

He had been found guilty in November 2023 of making an indecent communication meant to alarm.

A rejected recommendation of a weapons ban

LeReverend also rejected the prosecutor’s recommendation of a weapons ban, even though Laird had a record for assault with a weapon and had once used his semi truck to ram a weighmaster’s car into a building before attacking the much smaller man with a steel bar.

“I don’t believe this sentence is going to deter anyone else, or even him, from doing it again,” Schmidt said outside court.

Schmidt was particularly troubled by the judge’s rationale for refusing to impose a weapons ban.

During his rebuttal to the prosecutor’s sentencing submission, Laird, who was self-represented, told the court that he had served two tours with the Canadian Airborne Regiment and he was a hunter.

“I hunt to put meat on the table,” he said, and then he brazenly lied, claiming there had never been “any instances anywhere in this case of references to violence, threats of violence, use of firearms or weapons or anything like that.”

‘A veiled threat’

Laird’s email to Schmidt had been entered as evidence. LeReverend had surely reviewed it. She would know it contained a graphic photo of a man and a woman lying entwined, dead on the floor, in a pool of blood. The photo caption read: “NDP Marlin Schmidt and his wife.”

“Last week a gunman caught up with funnyman Marlin Schmidt and his wife while they were out shopping,” Laird’s email said. “It was hilarious as the gunman put a couple bullets into each of them, including a couple well-placed head shots.”

A few minutes before he made the hunting comment, Laird, testifying remotely from a Lethbridge prison, looked directly into the camera. He addressed Schmidt, one of Schmidt’s staff and me by name. Laird named us supposedly to make the point that there was little public interest in his case.

“I don't think it was a coincidence that Laird mentioned that he was a hunter in his sentencing submissions or that he named us,” Schmidt said. “I interpreted that as a veiled threat.”

“So for the judge to say that because he was a hunter, he didn't pose a threat and didn't require a weapons ban, was I think a serious error in the sentence.”

A five-day sentence

Special prosecutor Steven Johnston had recommended a six-month jail sentence. LeReverend pared it to four months but, as required by sentencing guidelines, she gave Laird 1.5 days’ credit for every day he had been held in custody awaiting sentencing. That left just five days to be served in this sentence.

Laird is in custody because he failed to appear at his initial sentencing hearing on Feb. 5. The RCMP arrested him on July 4 while he was sleeping in his truck at a highway rest stop.

The judge also ignored the fact that Laird showed no remorse or acknowledgment of the psychological harm he had inflicted. Laird insisted he was politically prosecuted for exercising his free speech. He characterized the email and graphic photo as political commentary, similar to a cartoon.

“I find it peculiar that we're dealing in a day and an age where now we're dragging people into court for being annoying,” Laird told the court.

Laird targeted Schmidt after he made a flippant comment about former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the legislature on July 8, 2020. Schmidt said the only thing he regretted about Thatcher’s 2013 death is that it was “probably 30 years too late.” Schmidt apologized after he was chastised by the Speaker.

The following day, July 9, 2020, Laird sent an email, subject titled “Alberta NDP funnyman Marlin Schmidt and his wife assassinated while shopping” to Schmidt and about 40 other federal, provincial and municipal politicians, journalists, columnists and media outlets.

Laird several times engaged in long rants in which he portrayed himself as a victim of a corrupt, politically correct justice system, and he accused Schmidt of playing the victim.

“I am being painted as an unhinged guy who is chasing Marlin Schmidt down the street, and he is quivering in doorways and around corners, and the evil Don Laird is lurking out there, tearing his life to pieces.

“And that is not a reflection of reality. That is contrived. It's melodrama, it's hysterics, it's rhetoric.”

A ‘sterling’ record

Laird also repeatedly told the court this was an isolated incident and his behaviour had been “sterling” during the past four years with no incidents of misconduct. This was another falsehood that the prosecutor never corrected on the record.

In one exchange, LeReverend asked Johnston: “And I take it as a fact that this occurred four years ago, and there hasn't been any further issues?”

“You certainly can,” Johnston replied.

As previously reported by The Tyee, Laird, using a pseudonym, had left racist voice-mail messages in March 2022 that targeted Black University of Alberta law professor Ubaka Ogbogu and another Black U of A professor.

Laird left the voice mails after former Alberta premier Jason Kenney personally attacked Ogbogu on the social media platform X.

Laird also left a voice-mail message with University of Calgary political scientist Melanee Thomas after she publicly supported Ogbogu.

Both Thomas and Ogbogu filed police complaints. Calgary police conducted the investigation, identified Laird and recommended charges. The Crown, however, declined to press charges, and Alberta Justice refused to explain why, citing another case pending against Laird in Lethbridge.

Lethbridge police charged Laird on March 31, 2022, with harassing a person, believed to be a judge, and two counts of inciting or promoting hate toward Muslims between Aug. 14 and Sept. 8, 2021.

Court records show Laird has had 10 charges dropped in Alberta since 2015, including six charges of unlawful harassment, one for harassment by mail and another for indecent communication.

Laird's three-day trial in Lethbridge begins Sept. 23.

If you have any information for this story, or information for another story, please contact Charles Rusnell in confidence via email.