One day this week, Environment Minister John Baird stood in the House of Commons to respond to a question and came out with something that opposition MPs found so unsatisfactory that they began to chant: "Rona, Rona, Rona."
A few seats down the row from Mr. Baird, his predecessor in the portfolio allowed herself a little grin. Rona Ambrose is accustomed to being the butt of a joke. It got so bad when she was ignominiously shuffled out of Environment just after Christmas that the young Albertan with the big hair decided to drop off the radar. Even now she won't talk openly about her troubled time in the post.
But she appears to be regaining her sense of humour.
"I'm going to start my own cosmetics line," she joked recently while serving as emcee at a fundraiser for the conservative Manning Centre.
Her first product, she told the well-heeled crowd at Ottawa's Fairmont Chateau Laurier, is a body cream especially for women going into politics.
"Put on lots," the label will read. "The more you put on, the thicker your skin gets."
The crowd chuckled, as did Ms. Ambrose. But she wasn't laughing a few months ago; she wasn't sleeping, either, a friend says. She was, as she told the Manning dinner, having "a kind of rough year."
The friend calls last year Ms. Ambrose's annus horribilis, a "perfect storm" when her personal and political lives collided, with disastrous results.
What caused that perfect storm, and what has she been up to since it died down?
RONNA, NOT ROANA
Small, stylish and attractive, with her signature curtain of dark hair, Ms. Ambrose arrived on Parliament Hill in 2004 as the rookie MP for Edmonton-Spruce Grove and soon made a name for herself even though no one could get it quite right. (She should be called "Ronna," but almost everyone says "Roana.")
While in opposition, she became an instant star by pressing Liberal cabinet ministers (she once called Grit heavyweight and hockey great Ken Dryden an "old white guy," demanding that he back off his child-care scheme because "working women want to make their own choices").
As well as French, she speaks Portuguese, having lived in Brazil as a child because her father worked for an international oil company.
As an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, she had earned a degree in feminist studies and volunteered for feminist organizations, such as Status of Women Canada. But then, a friend says, she slowly embraced libertarian beliefs in the style of writer Ayn Rand.
Her first taste of politics came in 2000, when she helped friend James Rajotte become the MP for Edmonton-Leduc. "She was an amazing organizer ... and had a keen interest in policy," he says.
Mr. Rajotte introduced her to Stephen Harper when Mr. Harper was running for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance, and she soon became fiercely loyal. Bitten by the political bug, Ms. Ambrose went after the Spruce Grove nomination - a hugely competitive race against seven rivals.
Shannon Haggerty, a friend who helped her win the nomination and later worked for her in Ottawa, says the contest was important for what was to come. "That gave her the shell, the armoured shell she was going to need for Environment."
Indeed, when the Conservatives came to power, the appointment of Ms. Ambrose, a mid-level Alberta bureaucrat dealing with federal-provincial relations, to the Environment post came as a surprise. The pundits had her pegged for Intergovernmental Affairs.
But Environment was not a priority for the Harper government, which totally underestimated its rising importance, and Ms. Ambrose fit the demographic that seemed most interested in such issues.
