BRAZEAU FACES ASSAULT CHARGE
Suspended senator held by police after domestic dispute at home of his girlfriend
Sometime after the police left and before the reporters arrived at the modest home in suburban Gatineau, Que., someone threw suspended senator Patrick Brazeau’s belongings out the back door on to the dirty snow.
By late morning, nobody had come to collect them, and reporters walked around, looking at the wreckage of a life in a downward spiral.
A bit more than two years ago, Brazeau was a senator, a cherished member of the Conservative family, poised to do battle with Justin Trudeau in a charity boxing match, assured of a guaranteed income until his retirement.
On Thursday, his worldly possessions were sprawled in an untidy pile with no sign that friends or family members were going to collect them.
Gatineau police said Brazeau, 39, was arrested in an intoxicated state at about 4 a. m. after a domestic dispute at the home, which is the residence of his girlfriend, who works as a bartender at Le Forum, a Gatineau sports bar. Brazeau was taken to jail and charged in the afternoon with assaulting his girlfriend and their mutual friend, Marc Lamontagne, 50, who used to work at Le Forum. He was also charged with cocaine possession, threatening Lamontagne and breaching his bail conditions from an assault and sex assault charge against a previous girlfriend.
In a brief court appearance Thursday, Brazeau pleaded not guilty to all five charges.
The Crown prosecutor asked and the judge agreed that Brazeau be kept in jail at least until Friday morning, when he was already scheduled to appear in a Gatineau courthouse on the earlier charges.
He also faces fraud and breach of trust charges related to his questionable expenses, which is what got him suspended from the Senate in November.
Le Forum is owned by the same family that owns Barefax, the downtown Ottawa strip bar where Brazeau started working as a day manager in February.
Carmelina Bentivoglio, a coowner of Barefax, said Thursday that she was disappointed to hear of Brazeau’s latest troubles.
“In here he’s been great,” she said. “He was nice and very respectful to them. Very quiet and reserved.”
She had no idea what happened early Thursday morning. “It’s hard to believe,” she said. “The way I see him and know him, it’s disappointing.”
She didn’t know if he would be returning to work at the bar. “We’ll see,” she said.
Debbie Simms, Brazeau’s friend and former staffer at the Senate, was saddened by Thursday’s news.
“I don’t have any direct knowledge of what happened this morning,” she said. “It is difficult news to hear and to process. Although many Canadians look at him and see various legal difficulties, I have only known him to be a kind, decent man and a good father.”
Simms enjoyed working with Brazeau in the Senate, working on aboriginal issues within the Conservative caucus. Brazeau has said he was disappointed that the government did not agree to his appeals to launch a public inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women.
Simms did several interviews sticking up for Brazeau after Conservative senators voted to suspend him from the Senate, along with colleagues Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin.
After speaking out publicly against the government’s treatment of Brazeau, she was not able to find other work in Ottawa, but recently lined up a job in another community and will soon be leaving town.
Brazeau was appointed to the Senate by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008. At the time he was the national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, an organization that represents off- reserve aboriginals.
Brazeau had been Harper’s only significant ally in aboriginal politics, giving him political cover as he endured criticism from the Assembly of First Nations over the government’s decision to undo the Kelowna Accord, an agreement worked out by then- Liberal prime minister Paul Martin.
Opposition critics and aboriginal leaders say Harper should have known better than to appoint Brazeau to the Senate, since at the time of his appointment he was the subject of a sexual harassment complaint, a critical audit into his organization’s spending, and had failed to make child support payments to the mother of his first child. He has three children by another woman.
Late last month, he said that he was doing his best to continue making those payments.
“Yes sir,” he said in an email. “My kids are # 1. Have to support them best I can.”