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Brown stripped MacLaren of his place in the Tory shadow cabinet, took away his ceremonial post chairing the party’s Eastern Ontario caucus, and told him not to return to Queen’s Park until he had his act together.

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MacLaren says that among his mistakes was complacency.

“I came of age in university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a time of increased sensitivity to women, people of colour and gay people. It was a time of sensitivity to environmentalism,” he says. He took all those things to heart, then and in his career before politics.

“But it’s easy to think you’ve looked after something as a person or as a society. I hadn’t, and we haven’t. I learned we have to keep vigilant about these issues constantly. I learned that words can hurt and I’ve redoubled my efforts to avoid giving offence,” MacLaren says.

The McCrimmon joke “had no profanity in it,” he points out (the humour arose from confusion over whether people in the joke, cribbed from the Internet, were talking about going to church or to bed). “It was a story containing words with a double-meaning and consensual relations between a married couple. But it was risky and wrong and I’ve learned my lesson.”

He’s now spent weeks picking up the wreckage. He’s edged back into community events and begun tweeting again with studied innocuousness, mainly miscellaneous facts about engineering and farming. The legislature’s about to break for the summer; in the fall, perhaps, he’ll return to his seat.