Toronto police have charged a 24-year-old man with arson after two vehicles were destroyed by fire in the driveway of Liberal MP Salma Zahid’s Scarborough home on Aug. 27, an attack that landed in the one part of a member of Parliament’s property that the House of Commons security program is least equipped to cover.
Roshvin Crofton was arrested Aug. 30 and the charges were announced Sept. 4, according to CBC News. He faces arson causing damage to property, mischief over $5,000, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, possession of incendiary material and failure to comply with probation. Police said an accelerant was poured on vehicles parked in the driveway of the home near Bellamy Road North and Lawrence Avenue East, that two vehicles caught fire and a third was damaged, and that the house itself was not damaged. Investigators seized a black 2025 Hyundai Sonata and said they are still looking for a second suspect. Police have not stated a motive and have not said whether the incident was targeted. None of the charges laid so far allege that Zahid was the intended target.
Zahid, who represents Scarborough Centre-Don Valley East, said publicly that her family was safe and that she would continue working. “We will follow the advice of security professionals always but I will go ahead with my work as the MP for the people of Scarborough Centre-Don Valley East,” she wrote on X.
What the coverage of the arrest has not addressed is what protection was actually available to her. The House of Commons, through the Board of Internal Economy, offers members home security systems for both a primary residence and a residence in the national capital region, along with mobile duress devices that let an MP summon help away from Parliament Hill. Those measures were designed after MPs began reporting threats at home during the pandemic, and they are built around two things: the dwelling and the person carrying the device. A fire set on vehicles in an open driveway overnight sits outside both. That is not a criticism of the officers or administrators who built the program. It is a description of a gap that this incident happens to illustrate precisely, because the vehicles burned and the house did not.
The scale of the underlying problem is documented, if not recent. Patrick McDonell, the House of Commons sergeant-at-arms and corporate security officer, told a parliamentary committee that files opened on threatening behaviour directed at MPs rose from roughly eight in 2019 to 530 in 2023, an increase of close to 800 per cent. McDonell attributed the rise mainly to online abuse, some of it triggered by clips of committee exchanges circulating on social media, alongside in-person incidents at events. Those remain the most recent figures the House has made public, and no updated count for 2024 or 2025 has been released.
The capacity behind the response has not kept pace. RCMP assistant commissioner Michele Paradis told CBC News that the number of MPs requesting protection had nearly doubled since 2018, and internal RCMP documents cited in that reporting described an urgent need to fill 235 positions in the protective unit. Spending has climbed with demand: the RCMP spent $1.3 million protecting MPs in fiscal 2021-22 and $1.8 million in 2022-23, then $2.5 million in the first nine months of the following fiscal year, a pace that pointed to roughly $3.4 million. Those totals exclude the cost of protecting the prime minister. Protection outside the permanent details assigned to the prime minister and the Governor General is granted case by case.
Two things are worth watching. The first is whether police identify the second suspect and state a motive, which is what will determine whether this is filed as political violence or as a crime that happened at a politician’s address. The second is whether the Board of Internal Economy revisits the scope of the residential program, which has been expanded reactively each time an incident exposed a gap. Nothing in the public record suggests a review is underway.
via CBC News
