‘Ottawa’ Code Maple Leaf: Stephen Harper’s Secret Plan for Going to the Hospital
In the weeks after a high-profile 2014 ambulance call to help a drunken teen at 24 Sussex Dr., Ottawa paramedics helped draft a confidential response protocol with special provisions to ensure Stephen Harper’s privacy in the event that he needed to be transported from the prime minister’s summer residence in Harrington Lake to hospital.
The confidential protocol was called Code Maple Leaf.
Unlike the routine for other patients in West Quebec, the special provisions – designed in part by Harper’s protective detail – required not one, but two ambulances to be dispatched to the lakeside residence, regardless of the medical emergency. It also afforded the then-prime minister transport from Chelsea to a hospital in Ottawa. Though Ottawa paramedics have a policy against transporting patients from Quebec, the confidential protocol obtained by the Citizen had them responding roughly 30 kilometres north of Ottawa, into Quebec, and returning to the Civic campus.