I wish Helena Guergis were on TV again tonight, claiming to know nothing about her husband's business dealings or drugs of any kind and professing her Christian faith. It was like watching The Sopranos, Season 1.
But I can't understand why she gave that interview this week. The matter of her being dismissed from the federal cabinet and thrown out of the Conservative caucus was still very much in the news. And had she lain low, it's possible that people might have forgotten that this is Helena Guergis we're talking about – yes, that Helena Guergis, the former, ineffectual minister for the status of women who yelled at people working in an airport.
Ms. Guergis has the Liberals bemoaning her fate as if she were Joan of Arc, and the NDP's Pat Martin bemoaning the fact that Prime Minister Stephen Harper “ruined her life.” That's possibly true, but it ignores the fact that he also largely made her life. He made her a cabinet minister. That's big.
I understand her distress over losing that. In fact, had she not so baldly solicited my sympathy while speaking with Peter Mansbridge on The National, she might have got it. She lost me with: “Some so-called experts have reached out to tell me, ‘If you want to save your political career, Helena … you need to lose your husband,' and that's not something of course I could ever do. … I come from a Christian family and a Christian community … and you don't turn your back on people and your loved ones.”
She didn't lose me just because, obviously, atheists and people of other faiths love people too. Nor because she attempted to deflect questions about her own and her husband's conduct and associations with a stirring, irrelevant defence of the traditional family. She lost me because, yes, that's exactly what many people do for their loved ones – they stand by them and they make sacrifices. But it's not an instant-gratification proposition. Sometimes there's no gratification. You're not supposed to walk back into work six weeks later and say, “Reward me for my selflessness.”
Truthfully the most confusing part of this saga, from my perspective, is that I find myself agreeing with the Conservatives. Which, for me, feels a lot like being drunk, and not in a good way. It strikes me (the room is spinning) that the Prime Minister ought to be able to fire anyone from his cabinet whom he feels he needs to fire, without giving a reason and without the approval of the Ethics Commissioner. And – oh, oh, oh, it hurts me to say this – I can see a situation wherein his discretion in these matters might be a genuine matter of national security.
There may be no smoking gun in the Guergis-Jaffer affair; going by this week's testimony, Derrick Snowdy, the private investigator who alerted the Tories, doesn't have one. It was a judgment call. Arguably the situation could have been dealt with more kindly, but Ms. Guergis is hardly the first person this government has treated badly. Has she really not noticed?
Possibly the Prime Minister intuited that Ms. Guergis mightn't be able to handle the kind of questions she certainly would be facing in the House of Commons right now. In which case – ouch, ouch, ouch – he was right.
Those questions would've been more pointed than the ones Mr. Mansbridge offered. I began to wonder if he had mistakenly prepped for an interview with the disabled five-year-old Saskatchewan boy whose parents claim he's been teased mercilessly on the school bus, so tender was the anchorman's tone.
Yet Ms. Guergis still made it abundantly clear she was stressed by them. Her evasive answers, given in a tone that suggested that Mr. Harper had cut the hair on her My Little Pony, were laden with what I sincerely hope was faux naiveté – because, again, she was a cabinet minister. And that's big,
Perhaps Mr. Harper came to wonder (yes, a bit late) if she had the self-control her position required. Again, the interview – just giving it – raises that question. There wasn't much to be gained, even if she'd sounded less entitled, more capable and more like someone seeking the privilege of public service. All she had to do was not be Helena Guergis in public a while longer, and there might have been folk songs written about her. She could have been our Casey Jones, our Airport Johnny Appleseed.
