Authors: Michael Harris
She greeted me as I came through the door. It’s easy to see why Stephen Harper chose the elegant Guergis to occupy the seat above him and to his right in Question Period. Every time he rose to answer a question, there was the telegenic Helena, a former Miss Huronia, nodding approvingly. “Everyone tried to please him in those days,” Guergis recalled. “I admit it, for a time I was one of them. There is so much jealousy amongst caucus—so pathetic—all hoping for some small recognition—recognition meaning favour
with the Leader. He is the one who gives things out.” Guergis even consented to the party paying for voice lessons to overcome something about her that they didn’t like: when speaking naturally, she has a baby voice. “In Question Period rehearsal, Stephen, other cabinet ministers, and Jenni Byrne would sit there watching,” Guergis told me. “Sometimes, some of them would coach. When I lapsed into my real voice, because it was hard to project that phony one for too long, Peter Van Loan would urge, ‘Helena, big-girl voice, big-girl voice.’”
Since her ejection from cabinet and the Conservative Party, Guergis’s life has consisted of a struggle to maintain her dignity, her reputation, and her marriage. She lives in her brother-in-law’s house and tells me she has “nothing” and that her husband, Rahim Jaffer, has “very little.” Jaffer spends a lot of time out of the country living at a cousin’s trailer in Florida. Diagnosed with chronic pain, Guergis is entering her third year of law school at the University of Alberta, but only her second year of required courses because her medical condition has worsened, forcing her to become a parttime student. She now requires a voice-activated system to type.
Much of this woman’s story has been mythologized. For one thing, she was not the daughter of rich and doting parents in Angus, Ontario, whom so many people believed her to be. When she became a young woman, her father, who owned a furniture store, advised her to find a husband “because her looks would be gone by age twenty-eight.” Although by Angus standards, the family was well-to-do, they were “by no means loaded,” as Guergis put it—though they would come to wield considerable political influence in the Simcoe-Grey electoral district.
Nor was life in Angus pastoral perfection. When Helena was a girl, police and provincial revenue officers raided the Guergis home looking for proof of income tax evasion. “I was standing there in my pyjamas and asked if I could put on my robe,” she
remembered. “They said no.” And then there was the racism: “Our skin was too dark for a lot of them,” she told me. “And on top of that I had this little, tiny voice that everyone made fun of.” One day, a teenager in Angus called her “a dirty, slimy Iraqi who should go back to where she came from.” (Guergis actually has Syrian, Jewish, and Swedish roots.)
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Guergis learned to be tough. When another kid was beating up her sister on an outdoor hockey rink, Helena threw the bully over the boards. Even after she made the long, difficult climb to the federal cabinet, skin colour was occasionally an issue in her hometown. “I was asked by a constituent why I had brought my driver with me to town, the brown man. I told them, ‘That’s not my driver, that’s my husband.’”
For all that troubled past, including a failed first marriage, Helena Guergis was, for a time, half of Ottawa’s premier power couple. But that sort of success came only after putting in a grinding fourteen and a half years for the Conservative Party in both Ontario and Ottawa, including a stint working for former Ontario finance minister Janet Ecker. The other half of the power duo was Rahim Jaffer, whose movie-star good looks and easy charm made him a natural for politics and a hit with his colleagues. He was known around town as “the life of the party” and “everyone’s best friend.”
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When Jaffer first asked Guergis along on a young MPs’ night out, she turned him down. “What’s wrong with her?” she heard him ask a fellow reveller. The truth was that Helena Guergis was not a party animal but a studious loner who preferred staying in to going out—not anti-social, but solitary. Rahim could not have known that she was smitten. “When I looked into those eyes, I knew he was the one for me. I hunted him after that.”
Jaffer, whose own family fled Kampala in Uganda to escape the reign of terror of Idi Amin, came to the Conservatives from the Reform Party. When he was just twenty-five, he won the federal riding in Edmonton that included the “cool” area
of Old Strathcona. Preston Manning was his leader. He stayed with politics after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives.
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At the height of his influence in the new Conservative Party, he became chair of the Conservative caucus. In fact, when Guergis and Jaffer decided to get married in 2007, they announced their engagement in caucus to a thunderous, standing ovation. There was one exception. Stephen Harper remained seated, staring. “I noticed that he was twirling his foot, the way he does when he is angry and thinking of pouncing,” Guergis told me.
For a time, the former beauty queen, who unexpectedly won the Ontario riding of Simcoe-Grey for the Conservatives in 2004, enjoyed the prime minister’s confidence. After Harper won a minority government in 2006, he called Guergis with some good news and some awkward news. The good news was that he was going to make her a parliamentary secretary—suggesting a possible cabinet post down the road and adding $15,000 to her paycheque. She would have to wait for the official swearingin for the other news—the person she’d be working for. “He made me parliamentary secretary to David Emerson. [Emerson became minister of international trade the same day he crossed the floor from the Liberals to join Harper.] It put me in a funny spot,” recalls Guergis. “For weeks I had been the lead in the House of Commons, criticizing Belinda Stronach for crossing the floor. Now I was working for a floor-crosser.” The connection with Emerson broadened her horizons. Back in 2004, she was the one Jason Kenney turned to when he was looking for someone to do some China-bashing. But Emerson’s economic rather than ideological analysis of the China relationship gradually persuaded Guergis that engagement was the better path.
Rahim and Helena would soon move into a four-level, $800,000 condominium in Ottawa’s trendy Byward Market—close to the
Hill. Helena failed to report the mortgage liability on the property on her declaration of assets, earning her a $100 fine from Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson—a minor offence in official Ottawa. The couple dined with the Harpers at 24 Sussex and zigzagged through Ottawa traffic in one of the multiple black security SUVs that took them all to the movies. On one occasion, Helena travelled with Harper in the PM’s SUV.
Just after New Year’s in 2007, Guergis made cabinet with a dual appointment: secretary of state both for Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and for Sport. A big part of her task in Foreign Affairs was to defend the Harper government over the increasingly controversial Afghan detainee affair. Guergis faithfully repeated the government’s mantra: no proof existed that prisoners handed over by Canadian forces to Afghanistan’s notorious National Directorate of Security had been tortured—a claim the opposition answered by demanding documented evidence. Liberal MP Derek Lee pointed out that “340 years of bedrock constitutional history” gave Parliament the right to look at unredacted documents. The Harper government refused.
Eventually, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Peter Milliken, ruled that Parliament did have the right to the documents, and an all-party committee (less the NDP) set to work on how access might be granted without damaging national security. Three former Supreme Court judges acted as backstop to the committee on sensitive issues. In the end, the committee was shut down, with the bulk of documents never released and both the letter and spirit of the Speaker’s ruling disregarded.
The detainee affair exploded onto the front pages in November 2009. After years of denying torture allegations, the then chief of the defence staff, General Walter Natynczyk, told the House of Commons Defence Committee that a prisoner transferred from Canadian custody to the Afghans had indeed been
abused. Defence minister Peter MacKay had previously insisted there was no evidence that detainees turned over by Canadian forces to the Afghans had been tortured.
W
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UERGIS
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a firm grip on the brass ring, it was a different story for Jaffer. The
Hill Times
voted him the “laziest MP in Ottawa.” In the 2008 federal election, the unthinkable happened to the popular MP. The New Democrats under Linda Duncan narrowly won Edmonton-Strathcona. Jaffer could now lay dubious claim to being the MP who spoiled the Conservatives’ otherwise clean sweep of every federal riding in Alberta.
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The prime minister was not pleased, and in a subsequent meeting with his defeated candidate he warned Jaffer not to lobby his former colleagues in government—a message repeated to Rahim by his cabinet minister wife. Word filtered back to Guergis that Harper had “dissed Rahim big time” as a “bad” caucus chair. The PM allegedly promised that his replacement would pay attention to all members, not just a few, suggesting that Jaffer played favourites.
It was a strange time for Jaffer after losing in Edmonton. No call came from the prime minister until Jaffer’s friends pressed Ray Novak to set up a meeting. “I wish we never had that meeting,” Jaffer recalled. “It was just a ten- to twelve-minute meeting, but he left me more crushed than I already was. I left more upset than when I came in, but more determined to succeed. Harper is willing to do anything it takes to keep the job, and people are expendable. The system makes him untouchable and he knew that if he went rogue, there was nothing much people could do about it.”
The only silver lining in Jaffer’s defeat was what Helena Guergis did next: “I grabbed a flight the day after the election to be with him. We were married in blue jeans in Ian McClelland’s backyard. (By Ian!) With Rahim’s cousin Alia and James Rajotte.
No honeymoon.” McClelland, a former MP, was a marriage commissioner, and James Rajotte, the most popular MP in the Conservative caucus.
In the same election in which her husband was defeated, Helena Guergis was returned in Simcoe-Grey with a whopping 55 percent of the vote. Stephen Harper appointed her minister of state for the Status of Women, a junior posting that many observers saw as a demotion. One person who was happy about that was Stéphane Dion. He wanted Harper to fire Guergis over leaking news of his visit to Afghanistan while she was in Foreign Affairs, a breach of practice that Dion said had endangered his life. A letter-writing campaign to newspapers praising the minister’s performance in office took place early in 2010, from people in her own circle—who withheld the fact of their relationship to Guergis.
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Despite the criticisms against Guergis, and although she still enjoyed the prime minister’s confidence, her political capital was diminishing. After hearing unconfirmed stories that Canadian officials had discovered torture paraphernalia in an Afghan prison, she refused to spout the party line on Afghanistan. She also was in open disagreement with the government’s handling of Sisters in Spirit, the organization that has done monumental research into the disappearance and deaths of over six hundred Native women. After passionately arguing for the preservation of the group’s funding as minister for the Status of Women, Guergis failed to persuade her cabinet colleagues. The Harper government refused to renew the program. Instead, it gave $10 million to the RCMP for a new centre for missing persons and unidentified remains. “I was very angry at him and I know it got back to him. I was not quiet about my dissent. You don’t diss Stephen that way.”
With people jockeying for the plums of office, government circles could sometimes be hotbeds of jealousy, gossip, and ambition. Stories began to circulate that Guergis was spoiled, prickly,
and entitled. They clucked about how many chauffeurs she went through, forgetting to mention that she had actually asked not to be assigned a driver. It was rarely mentioned that her severe allergies were a factor in the high turnover. “In one case,” she told me, “the driver was smoking in the car and trying to hide it with air freshener. I am severely allergic to it.”
If the knives were starting to come out against Helena Guergis, gossipy barbs were nothing compared to the powerful weapon her detractors were handed on the night of September 11, 2009. Rahim Jaffer, by that time in private business, was stopped for speeding by the OPP in the Ontario village of Palgrave. He was driving Guergis’s Ford Escape. After failing a “blow test,” the procedure used to determine if a Breathalyzer is required, Jaffer was arrested and taken back to the OPP detachment. Police administered a Breathalyzer, which he failed. The ex-MP was then strip-searched. He was subsequently charged for speeding, impaired driving, and possession of cocaine.
Jaffer had been socializing earlier that night with Nazim Gillani, a self-described Toronto financier who referred to the Club Paradise, a “gentleman’s” strip club, as his Bloor Street office. The night before, Helena Guergis had joined her husband and Gillani for dinner at Sassafras, a high-end restaurant in Toronto’s Yorkville district. Guergis was devastated when she heard the news of Jaffer’s arrest: “When I heard it on the radio, I told one of my assistants, ‘There must be another Rahim Jaffer, this can’t be him.’” According to Guergis, she experienced immediate consequences from Jaffer’s run-in with the law, including a visit to her riding by finance minister Jim Flaherty (now deceased) and Kellie Leitch (who ultimately replaced Guergis as MP for Simcoe-Grey). They were allegedly looking for key Guergis workers to switch to Kellie Leitch. “Yes, even before the boot happened. Jim had power, so they did,” Guergis told me.
It was a difficult Christmas that year for Helena Guergis. With her husband in disgrace and facing criminal charges, she decided not to attend the Conservative caucus Christmas party. Instead, Guergis and Jaffer held a small, informal get-together at their downtown condominium for any MPs who wanted to drop in. “A lot of people showed up, including Jason Kenney, an old friend of Rahim’s from the early days of Reform. But the big surprise was Justin Trudeau.”