In the past 50 years in Quebec, there have been two notable attempts to kill journalists by members of organized crime: when Jean-Pierre Charbonneau was shot the newsroom of Le Devoir in 1973 and when Michel C. Auger was shot six times in the parking lot outside the Journal de Montreal in 2000. Both survived.
But a threat recently made public revealed there could have been a third attempt three years ago, when a contract was put on the head of La Presse crime reporter Daniel Renaud.
“I was shaken,” Renaud was quoted saying in La Presse. “I am always careful about what I write. For me, the best guarantee for my protection is my writing.”
The French-language newspaper reported Friday that Quebec provincial police informed Renaud in the fall of 2022 that notorious hit man Frédérick Silva, whose trial Renaud covered the year before, had put out a $100,000 contract to have the journalist killed.
Premier François Legault reacted to the news at the National Assembly, saying, “it makes no sense in Quebec — we’re not in a movie — that there is a contract placed on the head of a journalist because he did his job.”
Silva was arrested in 2019 after going into hiding for months. He went on trial in 2021 for the first-degree murders of three men and the attempted murder of another, that occurred over the course of two years prior to his arrest.
Renaud was among the few journalists covering the entirety of the trial, at times being the only reporter in the courtroom. He remembers having suspicions that his work was bothering Silva, and taking extra looks around him as he’d leave his home in the morning, the reporter was quoted saying in an article published in La Presse Friday.
From hit man to police informant
The following year, though, Silva, realizing the evidence against him was so strong, made a deal with police to become an informant.
He was airlifted from prison and brought to a secure location, where police began the process of having him tell them every single crime he’d committed in his life, according to Vincent Larouche, who heads the newspaper’s investigative unit and wrote Friday’s article.
It’s in that process that Silva revealed to police that, from jail, he’d hired a team to kill Renaud for $100,000. Silva said his co-conspirators had reluctantly agreed to go after a journalist, according to recordings of Silva’s police confessions heard by La Presse.
Larouche said he and his team decided to publish the information as more of Silva’s revelations to police were beginning to circulate among media and in the justice system. In his confessions to police, Silva admitted to committing 13 murders and taking part in discussions regarding “dozens” of others, Larouche said.
“We thought we should put it out there and treat it as a very serious attack on freedom of the press because it is, you know,” Larouche told CBC News.
Renaud declined an interview request. Larouche explained that the reporter didn’t want to “become the story.”
“It was a shock, especially because it’s a case where he was just doing his job, showing up at work every morning, going to the courthouse, reporting on the evidence that was presented in a public trial. He was adhering to our ethical standards and covering something thoroughly, rigorously,” Larouche added.
The stress and dangers of the job
Charbonneau, who was shot at Le Devoir’s newsroom in 1973 and is now an MNA for the Parti Québécois, recalled how his own assassination attempt had prompted him to buy a gun and carry it everywhere with him at the time.
“It was probably an illusion that I could use this gun if another attempt happened,” Charbonneau said, noting the weapon was more of a way of managing stress — something he says you have to come to terms with in covering organized crime.
“This field is very dangerous. People don’t realize that. It’s like war journalists, you are at risk when you practise this kind of journalism.”
Éric-Pierre Champagne, the president of Quebec’s professional journalism federation, the FPJQ, said he worries Silva’s brazenness in calling a hit against a journalist is part of a larger trend of contempt for the profession.
“When Michel C. Auger was shot 24 years ago, there was a lot of backlash for crime organizations and I think they understood that was not a good thing for them because they wanted to operate in silence,” Champagne said.
“What I can say is we’re seeing a lot more threats in general,” he said, citing a survey conducted across Canada two years ago that found 56 per cent of journalists in the country had experienced threats or harassment online and 30 per cent had experienced them in person.
Larouche agrees journalists face an increasing amount of aggression.
“Threats and harassment, they’ve become very common. It’s worrying,” he said.
Renaud, who has been reporting on crime for 36 years, told La Presse he was “surprised and dismayed” that people around Silva in organized crime accepted his wish to kill Renaud, despite “apparently expressing reservations.”
“I don’t censor myself, but I always exercise restraint so as not to go into the details of the private lives of criminals and avoid putting lives in danger. So I never thought that I could have been the subject of such a contract,” Renaud said in La Presse.