Conservative Trade Minister David Emerson says he did call Prime Minister Stephen Harper a hard-ass, but he meant it as a compliment.
Mr. Emerson said Friday he would call people like hockey legend Gordie Howe and former prime minister Pierre Trudeau the same thing and he considers them heroes.
"Stephen Harper's a hard-ass because he has his views, he has his principles, he has his visions and he's prepared to stand by it and not be bowed and intimidated by people," Mr. Emerson said.
"And in that sense, yeah, he's a hard ass," the embattled Mr. Emerson told reporters at a meeting of the Vancouver Board of Trade.
His former Liberal aide was quoted recently as saying Mr. Emerson told him he was frustrated over Mr. Harper's tight control on cabinet.
Mr. Emerson denied most of those claims, saying the aide chose to spin their conversation in that direction.
A handful of protesters, upset over Mr. Emerson's defection to the governing Tories after the election, showed up outside his speech at a downtown hotel.
He was candid in his speech to the board of trade about how hard the last two months have been for him.
"This one of the few friendly audiences I get to speak to," he said.
He called himself a "walking scar" and joked that "nothing hurts any more." The crowd was silent.
Afterwards he told reporters he did have lunch with the aide and told him he's had a hard time since he crossed the floor and that friends have turned on him.
"I expressed my frustration and the pain that I had been through in the last 60 days and I talked about it, not as a matter of being unhappy with the new Conservative government, I talked about it as being a direct result of the treatment I got from people who I thought were friends and colleagues, namely a lot of the partisans in the Liberal party."
He said he told the aide how much more sophisticated he thought the Conservatives were in running government.
"I commented on the fact that cabinet meetings are much more focused, much more business-like."
Mr. Emerson said he told the aide that Canada now has a prime minister who is willing to say no and that Mr. Emerson thinks that is a good thing.
"I probably did say he was a hard-ass. It was meant as a compliment, not a criticism. If I call you a hard-ass I think you're a pretty solid guy and you've got grit. If I call you a soft-ass or a candy-ass then I'm criticizing you," Mr. Emerson said.
Mr. Emerson stuck mostly to business during his speech, warning the crowd that Western Canada is riding an economic commodity boom, and when the bust comes the economy may not be diversified enough to withstand the downturn.
"The problem is nobody has quite come up with the 'golden recipe' for economic diversification," he said.
Mr. Emerson, who's the minister for the Pacific Gateway, also has doubts that Vancouver is really yet a gateway to trade from Asia into Canada.
"We're a great conduit," he said. "But a relatively small proportion of that freight is actually what I would legitimately call gateway traffic."
He classified gateway traffic as goods that come through B.C. ports and are transferred on to the rest of Canada and through to the U.S.