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(LifeSiteNews) — Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) was briefly locked out of his Twitter account Wednesday for posting the email addresses of three reporters and blasting them as “idiots.”

Bernier wrote, “If you want to write to these idiots to tell them what you think of their disgusting smear jobs, here are their email addresses. They want to play dirty, we will play dirty too.”

Bernier’s tweet contained the work email addresses of three journalists from Global News, the Hill Times, and CTV News.

People’s Party spokesperson Martin Masse confirmed with LifeSiteNews that on Wednesday, Twitter froze some features of Bernier’s account for 12 hours and “asked that the tweets be deleted to get the features back because they contravene Twitter’s policy of not sharing personal information.”

Bernier complied and deleted the tweet.

Masse told LifeSiteNews that all Bernier did was share the email addresses of the three journalists “that can easily be found” online.

“And what he asked his followers was simply to write these journalists to tell them what they think of the disgusting hit pieces they keep writing on us, and the totally slanted questions they keep sending us,” said Masse.

In a statement, the Canadian Association of Journalists said Bernier’s tweet was “unacceptable and dangerous.”

According to a CTV News report, the reporters had asked Bernier why the PPC endorses “white nationalist groups” and “and whether it tolerates potential acts of hate by supporters on the campaign trail.”

Masse said those claims are “horrendously offensive and simply false.”

“We get such emails on a regular basis,” Masse told LifeSiteNews. “It’s also very disingenuous of these journalists to turn around and say we are harassing them.”

Some reporters claimed they had received hate mail as a result of Bernier’s tweet.

Last night, Bernier tweeted a reaction to the mainstream media reports about this.

“Leftist activists masquerading as journalists have been harassing us for years. They are inciting hatred against our supporters. They are despicable bullies. My team and I have excellent relations with fair-minded journalists. We will continue to tell the fake ones to get lost,” tweeted Bernier.

Some journalists in Canadian independent media came to the defense of Bernier, such as the founder of Rebel News, Ezra Levant.

“Our reporters assaulted: silence. Our reporters arrested: silence. Our reporter banned from attending the leaders debate: silence. Mean tweets from Maxime Bernier: ‘unacceptable and dangerous!’ The @caj are a partisan joke, concerned only with getting more bail-out money,” tweeted Levant yesterday.

Monday’s federal election saw Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau re-elected with a minority government. The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) under Erin O’Toole won only 119 seats, two fewer than in 2019.

The PPC, while not winning any seats, almost quadrupled its vote total from the 2019 election. The party won 5 percent of the popular vote, according to Elections Canada.

Bernier ran a campaign on freedom, fighting against vaccine passports, mandates, and masks, as well as government overreach.

O’Toole ran a campaign that swayed left and routinely brought up the fact he was “pro-choice,” which irked many CPC social conservative voters.