Thrilla on the Hilla Justin Trudeau, Justin Trudeau has been caricatured, dismissed and mocked for his bravado, belittled by others for the lack of parliamentary acumen he sometimes brings to the game.

But late Saturday night he proved something.

He can punch.

He can lay his ego on the line in a much-hyped charity boxing match and come up big, pummeling his trash-talking opponent, Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau, into submission.

He proved something else.

“I proved a Liberal can take a punch,’’ Trudeau said, after the bout as he met the media unmarked, barely tousled, not even breathing hard.

It’s was an apt allegory for a party reduced to a Commons rump, a party that has itself been battered, but is still standing.


And it might be a metaphor that interim leader Bob Rae can reinforce, because his Pugilist from Papineau laid an old-fashioned whupping on the cocky Prince of Patronage.

The fight was stopped in the third round as Trudeau, clearly in better condition, absorbed an early knockout bid from Brazeau, then turned on his tormenter with ferocity.

Brazeau emerged with a welt under his eye and a reddened nose, but he did not hesitate when asked what hurt most.

“Definitely my ego,’’ he said.

Conservatives in the crowd rose in anticipation as Brazeau answered the bell in the first round, then sat in disbelief as their Big Blue Hope crumpled under the onslaught from the Liberal they love to hate.

The two men squared off in the most anticipated political event — that did not include voters — in recent memory.

Trudeau, who was taught to box as a boy by his father, was striving for the first significant Liberal victory of any kind since 2004.

Brazeau, a former aboriginal leader appointed to the Senate in 2009, had become more intense and more focused on a knockout, as the fight approached.

But this was really a dream for any Canadian who wanted to see a politician get hit in the head, in a ring, where parliamentary immunity is unknown, no Speaker can shut you down and you can’t turn and run from a hostile media scrum.

It was the ultimate result of every partisan dust-up ever threatened in the stately House of Commons where shouted slurs are common and physical challenges are sometimes tossed in anger.

Federal Conservative cabinet ministers were sprinkled throughout the room of 780, where single tickets went for $250 and a ringside table cost $3,000.

Conservatives make little secret of their disdain for the Papineau MP with the famous name.

They blame him for directing a huge amount of traffic, via his Twitter account, to details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ divorce and his obscenity shouted at Environment Minister Peter Kent late last year.

Trudeau is flamboyant, to put it charitably.

But he does raise money, whether it was during the Movember moustache campaign for prostate cancer, or his charity striptease at a Canadian Liver Foundation event, “What a Girl Wants,’’ in Ottawa, which raised $128,000 last November.

He also mused about the acceptance of Quebec separatism if the country continued down the Conservative path, then backed off his position at a bizarre encounter with Ottawa journalists in which he spoke exclusively in the third person.

Brazeau, the country’s youngest senator, an Algonquin from Maniwaki, Que., was appointed in January 2009, and arrived in a blaze of controversy, at first stating he would continue to draw his six-figure salary as chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples at the same time he was drawing his six-figure Senate salary.

He subsequently resigned from the aboriginal organization.

Both men had personal reasons for the bout.

Brazeau’s mother died of lung cancer and he was with her at her bedside.

Trudeau’s father, the former prime minister, died from prostate cancer.

Over the last four years, the annual Fight for the Cure event in Ottawa has raised money for cancer research, including more than $125,000 in last year’s exhibition.

For all the tweeted tut-tuts from the more faint of heart, it cannot be forgotten that because of the profile of this year’s combatants, organizers believe they could raise more than $200,000.

A similar event, the Fight to End Cancer, is set for the Woodbine Racetrack on June 9.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Source: thestar