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“They’re (black constituents) looking for more ways that they can show how much they support and love the prime minister.”

A couple of hours after the gobsmacking Sept. 28 interview on GBKM FM, a free internet radio station based in Toronto, was posted to Twitter Wednesday by writer Andray Domise and the twitterverse went wild, Sgro attempted to walk the comments back.

The comments were “insensitive” she said on Facebook and “I should have known better, and I apologize.”

Photo by Handout

Actually, the comments were not insensitive. They were preposterous, almost certainly untrue, and condescending, in that Sgro, a white woman of 74, was purporting to speak for a diverse array of visible minorities, all of them quite able to speak for themselves without a self-appointed interpreter.

“The history of blackface is deeply racist and it is nothing other than discriminatory,” Sgro continued, borrowing heavily from Trudeau’s own script on the same subject.

“This issue has sparked an important conversation in our country and needs to be treated with great seriousness and sensitivity. I will continue to have these important conversations with my constituents.”

This is easily the dopiest incident in a dopey campaign.

Saying that her black constituents have more love for Trudeau because they were somehow touched that he wanted to have a black face too, just like them, is barely short of insane. It’s not a benign explanation: It presumes that the black population is a monolithic body; it presumes they weren’t insulted or hurt by Trudeau’s penchant for blackface, but somehow pleased.

And it’s not Sgro’s own explanation.

She attributed this new, deeper love to the black and brown people who live in her riding. They “have told me” of the deeper love, she said, as she knocked on doors and apparently combed the plazas for visible minorities.

And how would Sgro have picked up, in a couple of hours, the knowledge that had apparently mysteriously eluded her over her 32-year-long political career? (She started off in 1987 as a North York councillor, moved through that system until the GTA amalgamation, and was first elected as a Liberal MP in 1999.)

If she knew blackface was “deeply racist,” how on earth could she have made the remarks she did? If she didn’t know, which is what her apology-cum-walkback suggested, how did that manage to escape her notice, especially given she represents a uniquely diverse riding and is hardly a callow youth?

And clearly, her statement to the contrary, she has had no conversation with her constituents about this subject, least of all important conversations. Had she done so, were she a remotely sentient being, she wouldn’t have been capable of saying black people love Trudeau more because of the blackface incident.