Party of One (26 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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