The old lion may have been forced out of his former hunting grounds, but he still comes by from time to time to roar and scrap and let everyone know that he’s still mean and ornery and won’t take any crap.

That’s Brian Burke.

Or at least, that was Brian Burke on Wednesday night at a charity fundraiser at the midtown home of Toronto businessman Mike Wilson, who put his amazing collection of Toronto Maple Leafs paraphernalia on display in support of the Canadian Safe School Network and the fight against LGBTQ bullying, a cause very close to Burke’s heart.

Burke, who was fired in January 2013 by the Leafs and subsequently hired as the president of hockey operations of the Calgary Flames, was front and centre at a roundtable discussion at Wilson’s home, and let it be known that since he left this market (though he still maintains a home in T.O.) he has not softened a bit, particularly on his thoughts toward the Toronto media.

Burke was in rare Burke form at the fundraiser: Angry, charming, often hilarious, passionate about his fight against homosexual bullying, even suggesting at one point that, if he had the chance, he’d come back and work for the Leafs.

“I would take the job in Toronto again,” he said. “I had no regrets about working here. I loved it.”

As for the Toronto media, well, Burke didn’t actually bring the topic up. Someone asked for his thoughts and Burke, as he often does, held nothing back, suggesting at one point that 95% of the Toronto media are “conscientious, thorough guys.”

“The other 5%,” Burke added, “well, it’s a shame that we’re not allowed to kick the s--- out of them.”

Now, that quote has to be put in some context. Generally speaking, Burke was being funny. Indeed, he had the well-heeled crowd in the palm of his hand for most of the night with his often outrageous and caustic comments, particularly concerning the media. But there was a definite theme to his diatribes.

“It is a death of a thousand cuts,” said Burke when the subject of the Toronto media was raised during a Q&A. “And I loved working here. I thought I had the best job in hockey when I worked here. In Calgary, it’s not a whole lot better in terms of the media coverage. But you have 80% of the media that are ethical people that give a s---, want to get it right. The other 20% ruin it for everybody (he later jumped to the 95/5 formula). And, in Toronto, the problem is the magnitude, the scope. So 20 people say, ‘All right, (the Leafs) lost last night ...’

At this point during his rant, Burke noticed a Sun reporter.

“Are you taping this Steve?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re chicken s---.”

Again, the line was meant to get a laugh, and it certainly did.

Burke continued his thought: “So the 20% (of the unethical media guys) say, ‘Okay, I need an angle.’ So a guy has to write for tomorrow. ‘Who you going to blame for the loss? Okay, I’m going to pick Dion (Phaneuf).’ And the next paper, or the next radio station guy says, ‘We’ll go after Dave Nonis, or we’ll get Dave Poulin. We haven’t gotten him in a while.’ So it’s like the shotgun blast, and everyone gets it to some extent. So, to me, what’s wrong in this marketplace is the scope of it and the breadth of it, not the ethics of the people involved, which by and large I had no problem with how I was treated here by the group. But the reach, it’s like, ‘I have to have something different.’ It’s not ‘Get it right’ here. It’s ‘Get it first’ here, or ‘Don’t be last’ here. You don’t have to be right here. Just got to write something that no one else has.”

It’s a rant that certainly isn’t new, especially from Burke. Interestingly, though, Dave Nonis, the current GM of the Leafs, jumped on the bandwagon, adding that, like his former boss, he’s appreciative of the fans and media in Canada for their interest, but he certainly doesn’t pay attention to what’s being written or said or let the media influence his decision-making.

“I don’t pay attention to it,” said Nonis. “I don’t listen to the radio. I learned this in Vancouver a long time ago. I got a new car, I was driving home, the first time I ever had satellite radio and I said, ‘This is great, I don’t ever have to listen to the post-game show again.’ It doesn’t help. If you’re reading people that may or may not know what they’re talking about, or pay attention or come to practice — people that don’t come to practice but will write about players and their practice habits — if you’re listening to that and you’re making decisions based upon that, you have no chance of success in the Canadian market. Zero.”

Still, Burke, Nonis and Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf (who also took part in the round table along with Dave Poulin, the Leafs’ VP of hockey operations, and Sportsnet’s John Shannon, in support of the two charities), all maintained that while working in Toronto is tough, they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It is a very tough market to play in,” said Phaneuf, who attended the fundraiser with his actress wife Elisha Cuthbert. “As a player, it’s an unbelievable market. We’ve got great fans. But on the media side of it, there is a lot of scrutiny. There’s a lot of stuff that ... like Burkie said, there’s 80%-20% ...”

“Let me interrupt,” Burke interrupted, suddenly seizing on a point. “Francois Beauchemin: Couldn’t play here. Second team all-star in Anaheim (in 2012-13 after being traded by the Leafs to the Ducks in February 2011). Okay, what’s different? He’s the same player. Same wife. Fans didn’t change. What’s different? The media.”

The suggestion being that the Toronto media wanted Beauchemin traded — although Burke parlayed that trade into a huge bonus for the Leafs, getting Joffrey Lupul, defenceman Jake Gardiner and a fourth-round 2013 conditional draft pick in return for the aging defenceman.

“All I’m going to say is,” said Phaneuf, finishing his thought, “the media scrutiny is tough, but it comes with the territory. I love playing here. I love the city, the organization, everything about playing in Toronto. But I’d be lying if I sat up here and said there wasn’t a lot of scrutiny. But that comes with playing here and you have to accept it and you have to be able to deal with it.”

Shannon suggested that some players would never agree to play in Toronto, largely because of the media scrutiny. The others on the panel agreed.

“You’d have to ask the players that are coming here. Or not coming,” said Phaneuf, who has often found himself in the fans’ doghouse in T.O. “But I’ll tell you one thing: If I had the opportunity to come here, I would come here in a heartbeat. Because I’ve played here, I’ve seen it, I’ve been in the Canadian market my whole career. It’s kind of flip-flopped. Burkie’s now in Calgary. I was in Calgary. I saw the media, how it was out there. The difference between other Canadian markets and here is that there’s more cameras. If there’s five in Calgary, there’s 25 in a scrum in Toronto. And that’s just the way it is and something you have to deal with being a player here in Toronto.”

“We get 19,000 people in our building,” added Burke. “The media are critical to us. There’s five million people in Toronto. We only get 19,000 people in the building. We need to reach the other five million. They have to watch the game on TV, or read the Sun, the idiots that read the Sun — I’m kidding Steve — or the Star. They have to read the newspaper, they have to listen on radio, they have to watch Connected or watch SportsCentre. The speech we give to the players at the start of the year — Dion remembers — I said, ‘Look, I don’t care if you like these guys or not. We need them. We can only get 19,000 people here, which we do every goddamned night. We need to reach the other five million. So we need the media.’ ”

And so we’ll paraphrase what Frank Pentangeli said about Hyman Roth in The Godfather: Part II: Burke does business with the media, he respects the media, but he doesn’t particularly trust the media, and he certainly doesn’t listen to the media.

“They piled the press clippings up outside by my office,” said Burke. “And when I got fired (in Toronto), that pile was knee-deep high.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what they write,” he added. “But I do think, to be fair, I don’t feel like I got abused here by the media. I feel the treatment was largely fair. Do I feel that some stuff was handled in a horses--- way? Yep. But you’re in Canada, people care about hockey here. The price you pay for working in Canada is you’re going to get some horses---stuff. The beauty is, people love this game and care about this game. It’s not the same anywhere else. That’s why I’ve worked in Canada all my adult life when I can.”

To drive that point home, Burke shared an anecdote about his former assistant Nonis, who was walking downtown one cold night in Toronto when he heard someone yell his name. It turned out to be a homeless guy lying on a steam grate.

“Dave said, ‘Are you talking to me’? And the guy said, ‘Yeah. When are you going to fix my goddamned Toronto Maple Leafs?’ A homeless guy yelling at Dave Nonis. You think anyone in Anaheim knows who the assistant GM is? But that’s Toronto,” said Burke.

And that’s why, he added, it’s so special working for the Leafs.

steve.buffery@sunmedia.ca

twitter @beezersun