Rona Ambrose, then interim leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, speaks to reporters in Ottawa in February 2017. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

Former interim Conservative Party leader Rona Ambrose said she faced death threats from environmentalists when she served as Canada’s environment minister in the early 2000s.

Speaking at the Grow Canada agricultural conference in Ottawa on Wednesday, Ambrose remembered how she required additional security because of threats made on her life.

“I have to tell you, it was not all fun and games,” she said. “I had my life actually threatened, for real, by environmentalists. I had to have security outfit my home and my office with panic buttons. I had to have a bodyguard. I had to have undercover police protection — at times, actual SUVs full of people, full of guys, to protect me from environmentalists, of all things.”

The retired Alberta MP served as Canada’s environment minister from March 2006 to January 2007.

Ambrose said she was told by then-prime minister Stephen Harper at the time of her appointment that he wanted to give her a cabinet role that was “something really easy, with no controversy.”

“You can get your feet wet; this will be great for you. I’m going to give you environment,” she recalled Harper saying, earning several chuckles from the room.

That conversation took place before well-know environmental activist Al Gore arrived on the scene with his book An Inconvenient Truth.

“Within weeks, my office was flooded with letters from kids — little kids all over the country — with crayon-drawn photos of polar bears swimming, and they can’t make it from one ice floe to the next, because all the ice is melting and they’re all drowning and I’ve got to save them,” she recalled.

“It was just… It was mayhem.”

Within months of her appointment, Ambrose says there were calls to have her removed from her post.

“You are not worth your salt as a minister if you don’t get a call for your resignation, let me tell you,” she said with a chuckle.

At the time, the Conservatives had a minority government. The opposition parties banded together and threatened to “bring forward a motion to bring down the government over me … because I hadn’t fixed climate change yet,” Ambrose recalled.

Harper, she said, decided “to call their bluff” and the parties eventually backed down. “All that to say, that was my trial by fire. That was my first few months as a minister.”

The former Conservative cabinet minister would go on to serve as minister of a series of departments: Western economic diversification, labour, public works, status of women, health — and then as the Conservative Party of Canada’s interim leader from 2015 to 2017. She retired from politics in July 2017.

In August 2017, Ambrose was appointed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 13-member advisory panel on the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).