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Dearn is a gay man who believes in marriage. Pope Benedict’s pronouncement (near as I can tell, it appears to have been in reaction to his bishops telling him that half the Roman Catholic adoption agencies in Britain had closed when the law made it illegal to discriminate against gay applicants) would have been wounding and galling. Why didn’t he just say that?

And as for them “being deleted,” so what? That means, what, he never said what he said? What has their deletion to do with the price of eggs?

Mulcair Wednesday said he had no plans to throw Dearn under the bus.

“He felt very bad about it and I’m more than willing to move on from that,” Mulcair told reporters in Niagara Falls, Ont. “He’s made a mistake and he has apologized for it. For me, that’s enough.”

Dearn, who was 41 at the time of his appointment to Mulcair’s office last February, has had a long and interesting career.

According to a Hill Times story at the time, he’d come to the NDP from the Colleges & Institutes of Canada in Ottawa, and before that, spent years on Parliament Hill as a radio broadcaster for various stations. In 1999, he was the president of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

He left Canada for a couple of years to manage Radio FERN (Free Exchange Radio Network) in Sarajevo, and returned in 2001, working first in media relations for the Treasury Board and then for various federal government departments.

At the time of the Hill Times interview, Dearn was excited about working for the party and Mulcair, particularly the freedom the job offered after years of public service.