THE EXONERATION BLUES
Ihad just come from covering the Conservative Party convention in Calgary, an event that gave journalists little information but an excellent idea of what it might be like to take part in a cattle roundup—on the four-legged side of the process. Winter beat me to Edmonton. As I picked my way through the slush on Whyte Street on a raw Alberta afternoon in November 2013, I kept wondering if there was life after the “busty hooker” affair. I would soon find out. I was on my way to the Artisan Café to interview the star player in this tragicomedy: former Conservative cabinet minister Helena Guergis.
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.)1 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.”2
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.3 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.
WHILE GUERGIS KEPT 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.4 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.5
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.”
Then, on February 19, 2010—another public relations disaster. Arriving late for her flight from Charlottetown to Ottawa, an incident erupted between the flustered minister and airport security. An anonymous letter was sent to Liberal MP Wayne Easter accusing Guergis of screaming at airport staff and petulantly throwing her footwear, which she had been asked to remove before going through the scanner.6 The story got national attention—all of it bad for Guergis. It was as if all of her alleged personality issues were on display—but only in the anonymous letter, not in the airport video recording of the event. When the CBC’s chief correspondent, Peter Mansbridge, viewed the video, here is how he described what happened:
I watched the security video of that moment when Helena Guergis went through security at Charlottetown Airport. It was shot from five different cameras and from all sorts of different angles. You can see that she did not throw her shoes around, wave her hands around, or yell at anybody. I can tell you I have seen a lot worse on most of my trips through Canadian airports of people being upset about what they were being put through. It was pretty tame stuff.7
Sadly for Guergis, she worked for a prime minister who firmly believed that perception was reality. CTV’s Robert Fife reported on March 15, 2010, that people in the “highest ranks of the Conservative Party” had asked the prime minister to drop Guergis from cabinet after the alleged incident. They believed Guergis had “offended working-class Canadians by her actions and damaged the party’s reputation in Atlantic Canada— especially PEI.”8 The anonymous letter had painted a picture of a rude and condescending Conservative cabinet minister throwing her weight around in a way that damaged the Tory brand. An apology was arranged to dispel the negative image created by what was being widely reported as the minister’s tantrum. “I apologized,” she told me. “I was made to do and say things I didn’t want to.”
Guergis texted Peter MacKay to seek his advice about raising the matter in caucus. MacKay, who had been in the House of Commons since 1997, advised her to raise it herself before someone else did, to “get ahead of it.” Guergis remembers MacKay texting her “that no matter what happens, he would not forget what I had done for him.” It was a reference to her stout defence of MacKay in the House of Commons when he was accused of calling Belinda Stronach a “dog” after the couple’s breakup over Stronach’s defection to the Liberals.
Helena Guergis caught what should have been a break in early March 2010. The enormous burden of her husband’s criminal charges came and went. Rahim Jaffer pleaded guilty to careless driving, was given a $500 fine, and lost six demerit points from his licence. The big story was that Jaffer had escaped the scandal without a criminal record. That was because the more serious criminal charges of drunk driving and possession of cocaine were dropped. Crown prosecutor Marie Balogh explained that there was “no reasonable prospect of a conviction.” In the Crown’s view, the OPP had made two mistakes: they didn’t wait for Jaffer’s Calgary lawyers to call back before administering a Breathalyzer; and they strip-searched the former MP after finding cocaine in his clothing. What should have been a measure of vindication for Jaffer, and by implication, Guergis, turned into more public bludgeoning. Callers to radio talk shows described the outcome as a fix; and letters to the editors sided with the OPP, which wanted the trial to go forward, despite the Crown’s misgivings about how the police had handled the incident.
Beyond the hurly-burly of politics, a “miracle” occurred. Helena Guergis who had already had two miscarriages, one known, one unknown to her husband, became pregnant. She badly wanted a child but had trouble staying pregnant. The couple had visited a fertility clinic and been told there was virtually no hope. Guergis was determined to see this pregnancy through to childbirth. As her troubles mounted, she told me they said she was “lying about being pregnant.” Nine months later, Helena Guergis delivered a son, Zavier, on his father’s birthday—December 15, 2010.
Politics on the Hill was about to go Bollywood, a soap opera driven by the allegations of a private investigator named Derrick Snowdy, who had in turn gathered his information from the shadowy Toronto figure Nazim Gillani. Snowdy was working for a private client, Dennis Garces. He had been conducting an undercover investigation, posing as a potential business partner for Gillani to gather information about Gillani for his client. It was during that charade that Gillani revealed an alleged business connection to Jaffer and Guergis.
At the time, Gillani was the subject of a police fraud investigation. Gillani claimed, “Mr. Jaffer has opened up the Prime Minister’s Office to us”—words he committed to an email he would later apologize for writing in front of the Government Operations Committee of Parliament. When asked what Gillani did for a living, Snowdy told the same committee, “Serial fraud.” As if that weren’t sensational enough, Gillani also claimed that three offshore companies on Belize in the Caribbean had been “reserved” to hold cash for Jaffer and Guergis. Making that particular allegation more tantalizing was the fact that the couple had indeed travelled to Belize on government business three months before the 2008 election, while Jaffer was still an MP and his wife was a secretary of state for Foreign Affairs. To complete the tabloid titillation, Gillani said there were cellphone pictures of Guergis and Jaffer with “busty hookers” at a party where cocaine was snorted.
On the directions of his client, Snowdy began shopping his salacious scoop. According to Snowdy, he had already given his information to the RCMP and the OPP. He tried getting to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff but was rebuffed. He was met with a very different reception when he offered the same information to Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton. Hamilton returned Snowdy’s call at 11 p.m. on April 8, and listened closely to every detail of their conversation, which went on for an hour. Hamilton hung up and then alerted Ottawa immediately. The next day, he had a face-to-face meeting with Snowdy.
Hamilton was a big player in all things Conservative. He had participated in the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party in 2003. He also signed a retainer with the Conservative Party of Canada in 2008 to effectively become its in-house lawyer on three matters: compliance with elections legislation, in which he is reputed to be the country’s leading expert; the Conservative Fund of Canada; and anything involving individual Conservative MPs that raised legal issues. In the wake of the sponsorship scandal, Hamilton represented the party superbly at the Gomery Commission. He also played a role in the secret payment from the prime minister’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, to Senator Mike Duffy. He considered his ultimate client to be Stephen Harper, as prime minister and head of the party.
Without investigating any of the allegations made by Snowdy, Arthur Hamilton came to the conclusion that it was his duty under his retainer with the Conservative Party to pass the third-party hearsay about Guergis and Jaffer to the highest office in the land. Although the precise routing that landed Hamilton’s discussion with Snowdy on the prime minister’s desk is unknown, the information got to Stephen Harper immediately. After going over Hamilton’s report, but without looking into any of the hearsay allegations against his minister and his former caucus chair, let alone giving them a chance to respond to Snowdy’s accusations, Stephen Harper decided to fire Helena Guergis. He also decided to call in the RCMP and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson.
On April 9, 2010, the prime minister placed a call to the Dominican Republic, where Guergis was vacationing, and gave her the news. It was a conversation she would never forget. “He said ‘from one friend to another, it’s time you knew what your husband has been doing.’ I begged him not to fire me. He just laughed, slowly . . . and hung up. I tried to call him back but he wouldn’t take the call.” Harper announced Guergis’s “resignation,” with the information that she would sit as an independent pending the outcome of two investigations: one by the RCMP and the other by the ethics commissioner.
Every member of Guergis’s family advised her to hire someone who could act as a spokesperson in the coming media firestorm. She had a conversation with an old friend, Jamie Watt, to get some advice. Watt said he had a personal relationship with Arthur Hamilton and would give him a call. He made the call on April 9, but it didn’t do any good. The party was not pleased by the exminister’s contact with Jamie Watt. During Guergis’s battle to be readmitted to caucus, the Conservative Party would suggest that the couple tried to hire Watt, and it later asked Guergis in writing, “Why did you believe that you needed a registered lobbyist to represent you in your dealings with the government and the caucus?”
Meanwhile, Mary Dawson’s office moved expeditiously to carry out what must have been the shortest investigation on record. At 4 p.m. on Friday, April 9, private investigator Derrick Snowdy returned a call from the Ethics Commissioner’s Office. Quoting from the prime minister’s letter, a representative of the commissioner asked Snowdy about the allegations against Helena Guergis. “I said to him I had made no allegations against the Member,” recalled Snowdy. “He asked if I had spoken with the prime minister’s chief of staff. I said ‘No.’ Did I make any allegations against the member? I said ‘No.’ And then he stated to me, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to me that we have a complaint here. Thank you very much.’ Hung up the phone.”
April 9, 2010, must have been an interesting day at 1200 Vanier Parkway, the headquarters of the RCMP. Stephen Harper’s principal secretary, Raymond Novak, wrote to the then RCMP commissioner, William Elliott, for the prime minister:
The Prime Minister has asked me to provide the following information on his behalf.
Late last night our office became aware of the specifics of allegations made by Mr. Derrick Snowdy, a private investigator, concerning the conduct of Mr. Rahim Jaffer and the Hon. Helena Guergis. The allegations are numerous and include fraud, extortion, obtaining benefits by false pretences and involvement in prostitution. The extent of the allegations makes it impossible for me to summarize them completely in this short letter.
Novak went on to explain that the PMO had no first-hand knowledge of the allegations, but that the Conservative Party’s legal counsel Arthur Hamilton had communicated with Snowdy, who claimed to have collected evidence to corroborate his allegations. Snowdy informed Hamilton that his information had already been shared with the RCMP and the OPP. Novak wrote to the commissioner, “But I want to ensure that you are aware of it.” Novak gave him Hamilton’s office and cell phone numbers, and told him to let the PMO know if they could provide “any more assistance.”
Novak’s letter, based on hearsay three times removed from its alleged source, Nazim Gillani, was strange in many ways. The highest office in the land was involving the RCMP in a matter that a single telephone conversation had already persuaded the ethics commissioner was not worth investigating. And the prime minister was doing this without knowledge of either the truth of the allegations or the credibility of the people making them. Even stranger, if, as Novak wrote, Snowdy had already passed on his information to the RCMP and the OPP, why did the prime minister of Canada need to write to the RCMP commissioner? The information could hardly be considered a “tip” if two major police forces already had it. Or was the letter an implicit invitation straight from the top for the RCMP to launch an investigation? If so, it was successful.
Scrawled across the note bearing the prime minister’s letterhead, Commissioner Elliott wrote, “Please task ‘A’ Division with this for follow-up. I’d like regular update please. Thank You.” “A” Division certainly got the message, and the biweekly updates started coming. Seven officers, including an inspector, two staff sergeants, a sergeant, a corporal, and a constable, went to work lifting up every conceivable rock on the Guergis/Jaffer affair, while playing coy with the media that an investigation was actually in full swing. They were backed up by a prosecutor in the Ontario Attorney General’s Office.
One of the investigators’ initial interviews, on April 16, 2010, was with Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, who rode the elevator to the fifth floor of the RCMP building at 155 McArthur Street in Ottawa. The interview was conducted by lead investigator Inspector John Keuper and Staff Sergeant Stéphane St-Jacques of the Commercial Crime Section. Hamilton laid out nine different allegations that had been passed to him by Derrick Snowdy—which the private investigator had already disavowed to the ethics commissioner.
Making clear that he was just a “cut out” and didn’t “know anything,” Hamilton proceeded to give stunning details of Snowdy’s allegations—many of them already published in the Toronto Star. Someone was clearly leaking information to the newspaper, and reporter Kevin Donovan was following the story with alacrity. The picture Hamilton drew for the RCMP came down to this: Gillani and Jaffer were passing themselves off as “venture capitalists” who would use Jaffer’s political access to the government to draw on the government’s Green Fund for possible “bump-and-dump” stock deals in taking companies public. Helena Guergis attended some of the dinners to amplify the appearance of access because she was a federal cabinet minister. Finally, Gillani’s business practices included obtaining compromising cellphone shots of clients and even using physical intimidation to get his way.
Staff Sergeant Stéphane St-Jacques then asked Hamilton a question that had nothing to do with Derrick Snowdy or accounts in the media: “And, were you able to back up the story with something else?” “This is going to frustrate you, the answer is yes,” Hamilton replied. “Um, but, uh, what I was able to match this up with is privileged, because of previous retainer steps I had taken. Specific to, to the Minister, and um, Mr. Jaffer. And uh, without disclosing anything privileged, if I can, uh, if I can explain it this way. Had a private investigator called me out of the blue and told me that Prime Minister Harper was on the take, I would have kicked the tires. And you know, that, that’s one level of an allegation uh, to hear the information that was passed on about Mr. Jaffer and Minister Guergis; um, it did not create a big leap to determine that some of these statements were credible.” “Given prior history?” Inspector Keuper asked. “Yes. I’m afraid so,” Hamilton replied.9
The RCMP investigators also noted in their record of the interview, “Hamilton is aware of events involving Jaffer and Guergis at the 2008 Winnipeg Conservative Party convention. These events would be consistent with allegations and lend credibility to them.” What Hamilton may have been referring to was a “wedding social,” a tradition unique to Manitoba,10 thrown for Rahim and Helena by their friend and political colleague Rod Bruinooge, the Conservative MP for Winnipeg South. It was a Saturday night bash at the Delta Hotel featuring the Boogie Nights Band. There was only one problem, clearly not understood by those not from Manitoba. Attendees were charged admission, and it became an issue that the money may have been going into the pockets of Jaffer and Guergis. “I cringe at the thought of this still today,” Guergis told me. “When we figured this out, we insisted that it go to a charity. I never organized it, did not know there were tickets sold—I should have paid closer attention. I just wanted to help Rod. A wedding social with hundreds of my closest friends I never met before is what I called it. I was not keen on it from the start and only agreed because Rod asked me. This had potential in politics to be a big issue.”
Though Arthur Hamilton scrupulously avoided divulging any information that was “privileged,” about Winnipeg or anything else, he didn’t leave much doubt in the investigators’ minds as to what he thought about the ethics and judgment of either Guergis or Jaffer. Referring to Helena Guergis, Hamilton told the investigators, “Not only does Helena tolerate Jaffer hanging out with escorts, and prostitutes, but there’s apparently video of her snorting cocaine off the breast of a prostitute. I’ve made no verification of that.” (The allegation was not true.) Hamilton even alerted the investigators to a recent story in the press that they might have missed because of the Jaffer/Guergis affair’s domination of the news: “Uh, missed last week in the, in all of the press flurry, and I think possibly even before the Toronto Star article came out, there was a small little story about Mr. Jaffer potentially stealing money from the CONSERVATIVE caucus fund. You’ll remember that he was the chair of the CONSERVATIVE caucus before his defeat in the 2008 election. Um, the allegation in the paper was that Mr. Jaffer had taken an amount of money from that caucus fund.”
Though not reported publicly, the amount of money taken from the caucus fund by Jaffer after he lost the election of 2008 was $4,408.50. The Conservative Party said that Jaffer took the money without authority and tried to justify it with receipts submitted in 2009 to cover expenses he claims go back to the period of time when he was caucus chair. Jaffer had a meeting with the PMO’s chief of staff, Guy Giorno, over the matter, including the allegation that Rahim had stolen the money. Guergis wrote to the MP making that charge, Guy Lauzon. “I told him he was not the judge and jury and that he should consider what his comments would mean for the government if he were to keep telling people his version.” The dispute was never resolved.11
Investigators noted in their record of the interview, “Hamilton opines that, in view of the fact that Jaffer has personal business interests and that Guergis uses her office to lobby, both violate the Conflict of Interest Act and the Member’s Code.” Before Hamilton’s interview ended, he had a question of his own for the investigators: “Does the RCMP have any, um, expectation, obviously I’ve made no comment in the press, the CONSERVATIVE PARTY, the Prime Minister’s Office, are not making any comment about my actions. I assume my meeting with you is not going to be disclosed unless there is some extraordinary requirement that the RCMP do so?” “Uh, you’re right. Um, all our investigation, we’re keeping that for ourselves,” Staff Sergeant St-Jacques replied.
And so it went—for three solid months.The RCMP Commercial Crime Section interviewed every staff member, including the many drivers of Helena Guergis, looking for proof she had misused public resources or improperly shared them with her husband, offshored money, or committed fraud. The investigators delved into seven companies involved in the accusations, among them Greenpower Generation, Wright Tech Systems, Green Rite Solutions, and International Strategic Investments. They worked up financial and real estate profiles of both Guergis and Jaffer. They checked the couple out on CPIC, an information database maintained by the RCMP, and FINTRAC, Canada’s financial intelligence unit.12 They even interviewed Ken Murray Cook, the former Canadian ambassador in Guatemala, and also Canada’s high commissioner to Belize. They wanted to know if any meetings had taken place on the couple’s official trip to Belize in 2008, other than what was on the official program. The ambassador had witnessed none.
And so, on July 2, 2010, the chief superintendent of criminal operations in “A” Division, Serge Therriault, wrote a letter to the PMO staffer who had forwarded Derrick Snowdy’s allegations to the RCMP on behalf of the prime minister—Stephen Harper’s principal secretary, Ray Novak:
This is further to your correspondence to Commissioner Elliott of April 9th, 2010 pertaining to allegations of fraud, extortion, obtaining benefits by false pretences, and involvement in prostitution against former Conservative MP Helena Guergis and Mr. Rahim Jaffer.
This letter is to inform you that the RCMP has completed its investigation of your complaint of alleged criminal wrongdoing.
The investigation disclosed no evidence to support a charge under the Criminal Code. This determination was made with the benefit of legal advice from the Ministry of the Attorney-General for the Province of Ontario. . . .
After a very thorough, three-month, seven-person investigation by the national police force into the allegations against Guergis and Jaffer, the RCMP had found absolutely nothing to support charges against the couple.
If the PMO had done due diligence, it might not have climbed aboard the hearsay train so quickly. Just the year before making his shocking claims, Derrick Snowdy had declared personal bankruptcy with $13 million in liabilities, including $2 million owed to Revenue Canada. Snowdy’s source for the allegations against Guergis and Jaffer—Nazim Gillani—was under police investigation for fraud at the time of Snowdy’s discussions with him. He also claimed to have laundered money for the Hells Angels, had been fined for breaking the Income Tax Act in British Columbia, and had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon— a .22-calibre pistol.
Despite being fully cleared by an exhaustive RCMP criminal investigation, which generated a report more than 2,900 pages long, to Guergis, exoneration felt a lot like guilt. Although the prime minister had said that Guergis would sit as an independent in the House of Commons pending the outcomes of the RCMP investigation, she remained in exile. Harper wouldn’t take her back and seemed not to care that he had put two people through public hell for what turned out to be nothing.
Ray Novak had described Snowdy’s allegations in his letter to the commissioner of the RCMP this way: “I have been informed that Mr. Snowdy states that he has collected evidence to corroborate his allegations.” Compare that to what Derrick Snowdy said in testimony in front of the Government Operations Committee when the matter came before Parliament: “I have no evidence, or no information with respect to the conduct of Ms. Guergis in my possession or knowledge.” That is the same answer Snowdy gave to the ethics commissioner on the day Guergis was fired—and why there was no ethics investigation at that time.
It was an embarrassing fiasco. The Harper government had to come up with a justification for its crimeless punishment of Helena Guergis, who was out of cabinet and out of caucus. After all, when foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier left a briefcase of secret documents at his girlfriend’s apartment, he lost his place in cabinet but not in caucus. Stephen Harper couldn’t say that Guergis was thrown out because she had broken the law; the RCMP confirmed she hadn’t. He couldn’t say that she was ejected because she had used her ministerial letterhead to recommend the services of a constituent to another level of government; the late finance minister Jim Flaherty had been cited for exactly the same ethical breach, except that he was writing to a quasi-judicial body, the CRTC. Flaherty remained in cabinet and caucus. And if being under investigation by an officer of Parliament justified dismissal, then why hadn’t Lisa Raitt and Dean Del Mastro been thrown out of caucus when they were under investigation?13
The question was stubborn and needed answering: why was Helena Guergis cast into the outer darkness? In the end, the Harper government turned to low comedy. “Dean Del Mastro came out of caucus and gave an interview where he said that there was a standard in the Conservative caucus that I didn’t meet,” Guergis told me. “He knew what was coming down the pike for him [Elections Canada charges]—they knew even before the last election—and he said that. I let him have it.”
Helena Guergis isn’t shy about saying who she holds responsible for the injustice she has suffered: “I am no angel, but I never used coke and I’ve never even been in a strip club. Harper and his henchmen used to their advantage sexism and the acceptance of sexism to manipulate. Everyone fell for it. I was not even human, just something to kick around for a couple of years. The media disgust me as much as Harper does—they were stupid. Harper used them to carry out his plan and they still can’t see it. Rahim was a private person at the time of his arrest,14 and the media and Stephen made sure the whole country wanted to attack me for it. And they still think it is for me to answer for another person. Well, it is not.”