They Called Her “Climate Barbie.” She Fired Back

I n my forties, I decided to run for public office. We built an amazing team over two years with a hard-core grassroots campaign. Our motto was “Run Like a Girl.” And I won. I was appointed minister of the environment and climate change in 2015 in then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s first cabinet. I worked hard to bring people together to do big things. I did a lot that I’m proud of, such as securing a national climate plan. In 2019, I became minister of infrastructure and communities.

Then one day, in 2021, just over a month before I turned fifty, I decided to leave politics. Before an election in which I would easily have been re-elected, I just got on my bike, went to one of my favourite spots in the riding I represented, and announced I was done. I knew many people would be surprised and wouldn’t understand my decision. The truth is that while I loved most of my time in politics, I’d promised myself to leave when I’d done what I’d come to do.

I also knew that others would think I was chased out because of all the attacks. There’s no question that the volume of hate toward me was jarring and upsetting. It hurt that some people who had never met me, who had no idea what I was like, not only hated me but, let’s not mince words, wanted to hurt or even kill me or my kids. They couldn’t see that I was just a regular person doing the best I could at a very hard job. It was also terrible for my staff. They saw all of it and wanted to protect me, but they couldn’t. Regular people who followed me and replied to my posts were attacked as well.

I tried to rationalize that all women working on climate were subject to hate and that it wasn’t really about me. Study upon study has found that women who use their political power to push for environmental action are targeted much more frequently than their male counterparts, and the attacks they endure are far worse. Much of the nastiness and vitriol emerge from insecurity and fear, especially in male-dominated industries directly affected by environment and climate policies.

That said, I didn’t go into politics to fight Conservative politicians who were sexist and denied climate change. It was annoying and a distraction. I was just trying to do my job. It was hard enough tackling climate change. I resented also having to take on the mantle of being a woman in politics too.

As tough as I am, I think it took a toll on me, one I didn’t realize until I left politics. While there were still haters, I felt a massive weight lift off my shoulders when I left, because I no longer felt I had to care. It wasn’t my job anymore.

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I n September 2017, as we sat in the overcrowded lobby of our nondescript midtown New York hotel after a long day at the United Nations, I looked at my phone and saw that my Twitter feed had exploded. I scrolled through and quickly figured out why. Gerry Ritz, a former Conservative minister and current member of Parliament, had taken a shot at me online by referring to me as Climate Barbie.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that insult. It started soon after I became a minister and the label was coined by Rebel Media, a rage-farming far-right platform whose business model is largely based on attacking progressive politicians and real journalists and then suing anyone who dares call them out. I was one of their favourite targets. In fact, there was an active campaign against me, led by right-wing rage-farming outlets and amplified by their followers, that started basically the moment I was sworn in.

Being called Climate Barbie might not seem so bad especially after the blockbuster Barbie movie, where director Greta Gerwig helped recast Barbie in a feminist light. But this was way before that, and I certainly didn’t appreciate being called a Barbie. I never liked or played with Barbies, and I didn’t look or act like one. Ritz was trying to make me out as a bimbo: a woman who didn’t have the brains for the job and who’d been picked solely because of her gender and blonde hair. And it was layered with climate denial. He didn’t believe the science behind climate change. I had to hand it to him: misogyny and climate denial all wrapped up in one stupid viral tweet.

I’d done a good job until then of ignoring the hateful, sexist, and too-often violent tweets against me. My team, made up of a lot of smart, strong women, were protective of me and didn’t want me to see all of it, much less respond. Their logic, which wasn’t wrong, was that a response would bring even more attention to the attacks and likely increase them.

I couldn’t let it go. I expected a backlash from the haters on social media, but I knew I could handle it. I am Irish and from Steeltown. I’d learned to stand up to bullies. Ritz was trying to discredit me and knock me off my game—but that wasn’t going to happen.

I took a few minutes to carefully write and rewrite my response. I was thinking like a lawyer and wanted to be careful but direct with my choice of words. I pressed “Send.”

“Do you use that sexist language about your daughter, mother, sister?” my tweet said. “We need more women in politics. Your sexist comments won’t stop us.”

It went viral. There were some haters, but regular people, many who had followed my journey into politics, responded positively. It also attracted international media coverage. Clearly this incident hit a nerve.

Not long after the Ritz incident, I was going into a press conference after a meeting with all the provincial and territorial ministers of the environment. One of my staff whispered to me as I walked up to the mic: “Rebel Media is here.” I was furious. I knew they were there only to get a clip they could use repeatedly to mock me to their followers, who would join in, all amplified by bots and trolls and social media algorithms. On the spot, I made a call. I turned to my ministerial colleagues and said, “Sorry, I’m going to have to call this out.”

The first question was from Rebel Media. I used every ounce of energy I had to stay calm, keep my voice even and low, and speak slowly. I knew that, to pull this off, I couldn’t sound angry or upset. When you’re a woman in politics, you learn that if you don’t do that, you’ll be seen as emotional—or, worse, “shrill.” It was like I was back on the starting blocks in swimming, with everything going in slow motion. Looking back, I can tell my voice is almost shaking and I am uncomfortable. Before answering his question, I asked if he would commit to Rebel Media never calling me Climate Barbie again. I said, “There are lots of girls who want to get into politics, and it’s completely unacceptable that you do this.”

The exchange was caught live on TV, and this one, too, went viral on social media, largely in a good way. Many commentators and regular people spoke up against Rebel Media and its demeaning attacks on me. One man later stopped me in the street and said: “Thanks for doing that. I showed the clip to my kids and said, ‘That’s how you stand up to a bully.’”

My response wasn’t so much for myself but for every woman in politics and my kids. Anyone who wants to go into politics, especially women, shouldn’t have to put up with constant abuse.

O n April 1, 2019, the day the federal carbon tax became law in New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, I received a torrent of angry and hateful messages and tweets. They came from the usual suspects: climate deniers; haters calling me a liar for whatever I happened to say or do about climate change; trolls making derogatory and sexist comments about my looks, even the fact that I sometimes ride a bike wearing a dress, and, of course, calling me Climate Barbie.

Things took a darker turn that day. Besides the higher volume of tweets, I also noticed they were becoming more hateful and savage. Conor Anderson, a climate scientist and PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Climate Lab, conducted a data analysis, which you can read at conr.ca, of replies to my tweets on Twitter. He found that April 1, the day when carbon pricing—which I believed was a necessary tool for reducing emissions—took effect in those four provinces, had by far the highest volume of tweets directed at me.

My team and I could tell that the frequency and offensiveness of the replies to my tweets had intensified significantly. I wasn’t just Climate Barbie, I was a “traitor,” an “enemy,” a “communist piece of garbage.” I wasn’t just a blonde bimbo, I was a “stain on this country” who should “rot in hell.”

Many of the tweets were violent. One popular meme featured a Barbie doll being crushed by a sledgehammer. Another one had the message “Tick Tock, Barbie Bitch.” And it didn’t stop with me. The messages threatened my family as well and described different ways we would be attacked and how my kids should contract fatal diseases. I didn’t know it at the time, but my son, Matt, not only saw these tweets, he would sometimes respond and try to defend me while disarming the attackers with humour. When I found out, I told him to stop. There was no winning. But this hit me hard. I was worried about the impact on my kids.

Why did I get all this hate? I knew that carbon pricing was a deeply symbolic issue for people. Change is hard and takes time. Some people wanted it to happen overnight because of their legitimate concerns for the planet’s future. Others didn’t want it to happen because they worried about their or a loved one’s job.

I was also keenly aware of deeper psychological currents driving this. As climate minister, and a woman using her political power to advocate for climate change policies, I was a target for hate on two fronts: a deeply entrenched, misogynistic hatred of women and an antipathy to climate policies driven by a fear of change. Anderson’s analysis found that the content of the replies on my Twitter account included many anti-female slurs, including “Barbie,” “bitch,” and “cunt.” He concluded that the evidence showed that “climate change denial and misogyny seem to go hand-in-hand.”

Maybe, but let’s be real. A great part of the sentiment driving the attacks and misinformation against me originated with high-profile Conservative politicians like Pierre Poilievre and Andrew Scheer, along with their provincial counterparts. They would slam me and our government’s policies, saying that I didn’t care about workers, Canadians, or families because we were bringing in a “job-killing carbon tax.”

Rage farming and disinformation outlets such as Rebel Media and Ontario Proud would push the video clips or retweet or repost the posts from these politicians. Then trolls (real people) and bots (not real) and bot-fuelled campaigns would amplify the anger and fury against me, as would the algorithms used by social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook—which made it possible for vastly more people to see the angry responses and weigh in. It was endless.

State-sponsored disinformation was likely a culprit too. A 2019 CBC/Radio-Canada analysis of 9.6 million tweets from accounts since deleted found that “Twitter trolls linked to suspected foreign influence campaigns stoked controversy over pipelines and immigration in Canada.” These trolls were suspected of having originated in Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.

I started to worry about the threat of violence in real life. I met with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other agencies to see what they could do. Their reaction was demoralizing. A very senior member of the RCMP said to me that the solution was to get off social media. While that might seem like a reasonable idea now, back in 2018, Twitter was a great way to reach journalists who used the platform religiously, and it was one of the best platforms to communicate directly with constituents and Canadians.

My team reached out to the platform’s Canadian representatives, and they told us to report anything worrying. We explained that given the volume, that would take my staff every minute of every day. I asked how their algorithms worked and why instead of amplifying hate and violent posts they weren’t using their algorithms to identify and remove them. I received no answer. My team did its best to report the most offensive and worrying posts. Little was ever done.

I decided to take a different approach. I started blocking the worst accounts, partly because they were impeding reasonable discussions and were using my account to amplify their hate, but I also wanted a list of possible culprits to give authorities in case anything happened to me or my family. Yes, that’s what it came to.

In early 2021, I received a notice that Rebel Media was taking me to federal court, alleging that I had violated the Charter right to free expression of one of its employees by blocking them. Of course, it wasn’t just any employee. This is a woman who claims credit for coining the phrase “Climate Barbie” and had spent years harassing me.

Where many government cases like this often settle, I said, “Absolutely no way.” Rebel Media’s argument was as absurd as it was offensive. To give into the argument that their employee’s freedom of expression was violated if that person couldn’t attack me day in and day out was preposterous; it was also dangerous for democracy. Who in their right mind would go into politics, especially women, and sign up to be a punching bag for right-wing rage-farming outlets?

We commissioned an expert in online violence against women in politics, Dr. Gabrielle Bardall, a fellow with the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa, to conduct an analysis of the tweets against me. What she found was extremely telling. Her report outlined that I was targeted by a “sustained and hostile violence against women in politics (VAWP) campaign” instigated by Rebel Media. The report also highlighted that violence against women has “distinctly gendered impacts” on the exercise of civil and political rights. These include: fewer women running for office, more elected women resigning or retiring early, and greater difficulty recruiting female candidates.

The report also made a critical point: “It is well documented that abuse, incivility and harassment on social media often spill over into offline and physical harm. This creates another reason for credible fear and intimidation. Minister McKenna clearly faced such a credible concern.” The expert report concluded I had the “right to mitigate abusive attacks by using blocking functions.”

I was fully prepared to go to court, but Rebel Media dropped its action against me when I left politics. I assume they realized I not only had a solid case against their allegations but also against them. This is partly why I was so disappointed when a similar case against Stephen Guilbeault, my successor as minister of environment and climate change, was settled, with an agreement to unblock the head of Rebel Media and pay a settlement. Sometimes you need to fight your harassers.

Of course, I wasn’t the only woman working on climate who was attacked on social media. Basically, any woman who is working in the field gets targeted. Shannon Phillips, former environment minister of Alberta, also spoke out against violent tweets attacking women in politics. On May 25, 2016, she retweeted a post from a man who said, “My boot would look nice on @SPhillipsAB’s face,” and she wrote, “I have no idea why women might think twice about entering politics.”

Earlier the same year, police charged a man who made death threats to staff in her office, allegedly because he was angry about the carbon tax her New Democratic Party government had brought in.

The situation has only become worse under Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, which soon became X. The real threat to freedom of speech is when women and other victims simply stop standing up and speaking out about online abuse. When we look back, I think we will see how irrational this twenty-year experience in unregulated social media has been.

W hen I left the environment and climate change portfolio for infrastructure, I thought the attacks, harassment, and hate would end. They didn’t. In fact, what was happening online was often happening in person.

People would call my office and yell at my staff. We would get disturbing threats in letters or packages with bizarre contents. My neighbours, who were always watching out for me, noticed strange incidents, like when a car with some men inside pulled up in front of my house and took selfies with my house as the backdrop. I reported the incident to Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly, who immediately took my concerns seriously and explained that the video was likely meant to be a “trophy” that was later posted online.

Of course, some of this had started before. There was one infamous incident involving the c-word written on my campaign office. Another time, my kids and I were headed to a movie near our house one night. I was walking and my kids were skateboarding. A guy driving his car by the theatre stopped in front of us. I thought he was going to ask for directions. Instead, he started swearing—“Fuck you, Climate Barbie”—and began videotaping and continuing to hurl abuse at me. I knew that, as soon as he left us, he’d post that video online. It was terrifying, because now it involved my kids.

And it wasn’t just folks who were on the right of the political spectrum. At an event in Victoria, BC, where I’d come to announce that we planned to make a major investment in conservation projects across the country over the next three years, activists screamed at me, called me a “climate criminal,” and tried to arrest me. It was jarring. Thankfully, the RCMP intervened.

But most of the time, I’d report the incidents to the RCMP and it didn’t seem like there were any real solutions. I’d hear that the issue was outside their jurisdiction and a matter for parliamentary security or even the Ottawa police. At one point, the RCMP installed a panic button in my house, but I was told it wasn’t actually monitored twenty-four hours a day. I asked them if it was better to just call 911. They said if an incident took place outside of office hours, that was probably a good idea. I know they were under-resourced, but seriously? I eventually decided to hire an agency to review my house for vulnerabilities and suggest what I could do to make it safer.

I just wanted to do my job, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking about what happened to United States representative Gabby Giffords in 2011, when she was shot during a local meeting. She was critically injured and left with a severe brain injury. Six other people were killed. The perpetrator was a twenty-two-year-old man who was obsessed with Giffords. Then there was Jo Cox, a British member of Parliament who was fatally shot and stabbed by a fifty-two-year-old male constituent. He was a white supremacist who shouted “Britain first” when he attacked her. This happened right before she was set to hold meetings with her constituents.

And this was before the appalling 2020 plot by members of a far-right militia to kidnap and kill Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. The male plotters used threats such as “Just cap her” and “Grab the fucking governor, just grab the bitch.” In her book, The True Gretch, Whitmer spoke about the serious toll the incident took on her family. I got to know Whitmer when I was infrastructure minister and we worked on files together. I can confirm that she is no shrinking violet and wasn’t going to let all the threats, attacks, and even the kidnapping incident get her down.

My final straw came in August 2020, during the pandemic, when a man came to my constituency office. We’d chosen an office that was on a main street and accessible and open to the public—that was important to me. He came to the door, and when one of my staff opened it, he started hurling abuses while filming the whole thing. It was during COVID-19, so when my staff member opened the door, she explained that the office wasn’t open to the public. He then started yelling profanities, before my staff member was able to close the door.

Initially, my staff didn’t tell me, because I was with my kids at my parents’ house in Hamilton. They didn’t want to upset me. They did tell the RCMP but heard nothing back. Then I saw the video posted on Twitter. I was beside myself. My poor staff member. Not only did I need to protect myself and my family, I needed to protect my staff.

I headed back to Ottawa the next day with my kids. I was worried about our safety. I called my chief of staff and said that I needed him to tell the Prime Minister’s Office that I wanted a meeting with everyone who was responsible for my security. A meeting was hastily organized the next day with the various security agencies and departments. It was like I wasn’t even there. First, they spent time passing the buck about who was actually responsible for my safety at different times of the day and in different places.

I lost my cool. I said, “I don’t give a damn about jurisdiction. I’m one person, and whether I’m on the Hill, off the Hill, travelling for work, at home, or at a park with my kids, I’m only being targeted because of my job. It’s not a random thing that my campaign office was targeted or that my constituency office was targeted or that people harass me and my family on the street or take weird pictures in front of my house.”

I was furious. “If anything happens to me or my family, I’m holding all of you responsible.”

At some point, the RCMP increased security and took the protection of ministers, including myself, more seriously. I still think about Gifford, Cox, and Whitmer. Canadian politicians of all parties and backgrounds are much more vulnerable than we admit. I sincerely hope someone doesn’t pay an unconscionable price.

Adapted from Run like a Girl: A Memoir of Ambition, Resilience, and Fighting for Change. Copyright © 2025 Catherine McKenna. Reprinted by permission of Sutherland House Books.