Trudeau ‘regrets’ Brazeau comments

Should send Rolling Stone a letter: advocate

VANCOUVER • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he “regrets” comments he made about Sen. Patrick Brazeau in Rolling Stone, but an Indigenous advocate wants him to express his remorse in a letter to the popular U.S. magazine.

Trudeau told Rolling Stone in a story titled Justin Trudeau: The North Star, that his choice of Brazeau as an opponent in a March 2012 charity boxing match “wasn’t random.” Brazeau is from the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation in Quebec.

“I wanted someone who would be a good foil, and we stumbled upon the scrappy tough-guy senator from an Indigenous community. He fit the bill and it was a very nice counterpoint,” Trudeau told the magazine.

“I saw it as the right kind of narrative, the right story to tell,” he said about the cancerfundraiser fight he won in Ottawa when he was a member of Parliament.

On Tuesday, Trudeau said in a CBC radio interview in Vancouver that he regretted his choice of language in describing the Independent senator.

“The way I have personally engaged with Indigenous leadership and Indigenous communities over the past years and certainly as we’re doing it as a government, recognizes that there are a lot of patterns to change,” said Trudeau, who has made reconciliation with First Nations a top priority.

“I try and make sure that we’re staying focused on recognizing that true reconciliation involves changing approaches and changing mindset. The way I framed it and characterized that doesn’t contribute to the positive spirit of reconciliation that I like to think and I know my government stands for.”

Brazeau declined comment.

Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, said she’s glad Trudeau apologized, saying the image of “the savage and the civilized” has dominated Canadian government for too long.

However, it’s important for the prime minister to set the record straight in a letter to Rolling Stone “so the same people who read that article actually get to learn from the humility of him saying what he did was wrong and why it was wrong,” she said.

Trudeau was in Vancouver Tuesday to meet Mayor Gregor Robertson, with whom he expected to discuss transit infrastructure, housing affordability and the deadly opioid crisis.

But Trudeau declined to say prior to the meeting whether the two planned to broach the sensitive topic of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. The federal government approved Kinder Morgan’s $7.4-billion proposal last November despite Robertson’s stalwart opposition to the project, which will result in a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic in the waters off Vancouver..