OTTAWA — Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt had no idea her taped remarks to an aide would be “so taken out of context” and that’s why she didn’t promptly apologize, she said yesterday.
Raitt told Toronto radio station CFRB that when she spoke of the isotope shortage and radioactive leaks as being “sexy,” she meant only that they would be “attractive for people to report on.”
“I knew what I had said, I certainly knew the spirit in which I had said it, which was by no means to be disrespectful to cancer victims or parents,” Raitt said.
A former aide accidentally recorded the remarks in January, and the recording eventually landed in the hands of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, which reported it Monday night.
But it wasn’t until Wednesday that Raitt made a brief, emotional statement of apology — after cancer patients, constituents and opposition politicians demanded one.
Raitt told CFRB that it was only after Tuesday’s question period in Parliament that she fully realized how her comments were being interpreted.
“I didn’t think that it would have been so taken out of context and so widely reported and so inflamed,” she said.
Raitt said she spoke to constituents and family and realized “people were taking it in a very different way [from what] had been intended.”
She then decided to make an apology the next morning.
Raitt also used the radio interview to rebut suggestions this week from MDS Nordion that the cancelled MAPLE nuclear reactor project could be restarted to deal with the shortage of medical isotopes caused when the Chalk River NRU reactor had to be shut down for repairs May 14.
Nordion officials told a parliamentary committee this week the MAPLE project could be restarted to replace the aging NRU. But Raitt said serious technical problems that originally forced the cancellation of the MAPLE plan could not be easily overcome.
She said Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. had consulted widely with experts from around the world and concluded that even if it could be fixed, the timeline was somewhere between 2013 and 2018.
christina.spencer@sunmedia.ca
