Jayne Ellen Heideck, 42, was detained Monday by RCMP officers in Kelowna, B.C., and is being returned to Montreal.
She will face charges stemming from a fire in early May at the Centre métropolitain de chirurgie in Montreal.
The blaze started when an assailant burst through a backdoor opened by a staff member and ran up into a surgical suite with an incendiary device. Sprinklers dowsed the flames before firefighters arrived, but the blaze still caused $700,000 in damage.
Police were considered the possibility the attack was a hate crime, because of the clinic’s specialty in gender reassignment surgery (or gender affirming surgery, as is the preferred term) as well as other plastic and bariatric procedures. While a trans person might be able to get cosmetic or upper body surgeries elsewhere in Canada, the private Montreal clinic is the only one in the country that performs the most complicated genital surgeries.
