MP McCrimmon gets apology after public outcry over MPP’s crude joke

[MP Karen McCrimmon/Radio-Canada]

An Ontario MP has received an apology via email for a crude joke made about her and her husband by Ontario MPP Jack MacLaren at a charity event last month following a huge outcry over the matter.

“We received it this morning, and I’ve accepted his apology,” Karen McCrimmon, Liberal MP for Kanata-Carleton and parliamentary secretary for Veterans Affairs, tells Yahoo Canada News.

She’s ready to consider the matter resolved, McCrimmon says — if MacLaren also apologizes to those who put on the event, a fundraiser for men’s cancers held in Carp, Ont., on March 24.

“I really think that he owes them an apology because this was their event, you know?” McCrimmon says. “This was their celebration.”

MacLaren, the PC MPP for Carleton-Mississippi Mills and an invited guest, got on stage during the event as planned to read greetings as the provincial riding representative.

McCrimmon was not scheduled to speak at that time, she says, and didn’t want to come to the stage when summoned multiple times by MacLaren. The Toronto Star reported that when she did, MacLaren told a sexual joke about McCrimmon and her husband.

“It had to have been planned because I didn’t want to come up. I was working behind the bar, volunteering,” she says. “This was not a slip of a tongue. He read it off a piece of paper.”

Beyond her own embarrassment, the offence of the joke was clear immediately, McCrimmon says, judging from the faces she saw from the stage.

“When he told that joke and I looked out into this group of people, they were mortified,” she says. “They were insulted that he would use their venue that [way]. They had given him the opportunity to speak, and then he goes and says something like this.”

MacLaren’s own party Leader Patrick Brown said Wednesday that the comments by the MPP were “mysogynist” and “unequivocally inappropriate,” The Canadian Press reported.

And McCrimmon says that though some have commented that MacLaren’s humour is typical for rural areas, she finds that characterization both incorrect and unfair.

“Nothing is further from the truth,” McCrimmon says of the area, and the group who held the fundraiser. “His conduct is certainly not a reflection of those people.”

That’s borne out by the fact that 30 to 40 men came up to her personally at the event to apologize that she had been subject to the comments from MacLaren, McCrimmon says.

“It was heartening,” McCrimmon says. “That’s the best kind of correction, when people are willing to stand up and say, that’s not acceptable.”

MacLaren did not immediately respond to a request for comment.