Helena Guergis is already a former cabinet minister and an former Conservative MP, and in a couple of weeks she may be a former MP.
But she has a rich future ahead as a professional victim.
You don’t often get to see political shows like the one Guergis she provided Friday.
She came out kickin’ and cryin’, alternately firing away at a “shameful” Stephen Harper and wallowing in her nightmarish year.
She made her treatment a national campaign story, lamented her lack of joy during her pregnancy, and railed against the “smearing” of her reputation by Harper and his inner circle.
“This ... is the worst kind of politics, the kind that Canadians abhor,” she said of Harper, with more venom than any party leader could muster at this week’s debates.
She trotted out her 4-month-old son Zavier for the cameras, but her supportive spouse, the man they call “Mr. Mom” in these parts?
Rahim Jaffer was nowhere to be seen and that, in a nutshell, is Guergis’s problem.
If Harper was wrong to fire her so precipitously and hand her case over to the RCMP last April, it was because he overreacted in making a political problem a criminal problem.
He clearly had had enough of Guergis and that was largely because he and his inner circle had had enough of Jaffer, seen by Harper as a slacker, a frat boy, a case of arrested development who fumbled away a safe Tory seat in Edmonton, then wouldn’t go away.
Jaffer was — and is — toxic.
He beat a cocaine possession and drunk driving charge with a $500 fine for careless driving in 2010, but his troubles lay ahead.
When the Star reported that he was consorting with some questionable cronies and boasting of access to the Prime Minister’s Office, Harper booted Guergis out of caucus a year ago, referring “serious allegations’’ about her to the RCMP.
Guergis has been wronged, sideswiped by a Prime Minister’s anger at her spouse.
Friday, however, she was able to wave a document, dated July 2, 2010, from the RCMP, saying there was no evidence to support criminal charges on allegations of fraud, extortion, obtaining benefits by false pretences and involvement in prostitution.
She was alleged to have snorted coke off a hooker’s breast.
Those allegations were brought by Ray Novak, Harper’s principal secretary, in a letter to Bill Elliott, commissioner of the RCMP.
The allegations stemmed from a meeting between private investigator Derrick Snowdy and the Conservative party’s legal counsel Arthur Hamilton — although Snowdy later told a parliamentary committee that he had no evidence to back the allegations.
Guergis may have been exonerated, but Friday she pronounced Harper guilty of “unacceptable behaviour.”
She accused Harper of putting himself above the law and being undemocratic, while still maintaining she is true to Conservative values and would vote with his party in the Commons if she is elected in Simcoe-Grey as an Independent Conservative.
Depending on which polls are to be trusted here, Guergis is running anywhere from first to third, but she is clearly in a tough battle with the official Conservative candidate, Kellie Leitch.
Guergis said Harper had to be accountable, must now “do the right thing.”
But should Canadians vote for something she has branded as anti-democratic?
“He has to be held accountable for his behaviour,” she said.
But if the leader of the country will not stand up for justice, “who can they trust?” she said.
If she is hurting Harper’s campaign, she retorted: “That’s Stephen Harper’s problem.”
Harper could not even bring himself to repeat her name when asked about Guergis on Friday.
“There is no desire to see the return of this member to our caucus,” he said.
He said the decision to kick her out of the Conservative caucus was based on other factors, including a temper tantrum at an airport in Charlottetown, where she berated security staff for asking her to remove her shoes for inspection before boarding an airplane.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who called for Guergis’s resignation in 2010, and NDP Leader Jack Layton both accused Harper of a double standard by throwing Guergis under the bus while keeping adviser Bruce Carson as part of the inner circle even though he had been convicted of fraud five times.
Guergis’s stumble through the political wilderness will be long and cold, even if she does win this riding on May 2.
She was a political problem for Harper.
But he treated her like a criminal.
Both will be hurt.
Outside her committee room, Guergis supporter Marian Currie said she had voted Conservative all her life, but never will again.
“Tell the Prime Minister to leave her alone,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
Tim Harper is a national affairs writer for the Toronto Star.