Helena Guergis has stepped up her effort to speak to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and return to the Conservative fold, pointing out that she is sitting on potentially damaging information for her one-time party.
The former minister of state for the status of women has told Maclean’s that she will run in the next election, even if she has to do so as an independent.
She said her first choice remains the Conservative Party, which has rejected all her attempts to return to caucus since she was cleared last month of allegations of criminal wrongdoing.
“I really hope I’m not pushed further away from the caucus, or from the Prime Minister,” Ms. Guergis said in an interview with veteran journalist Peter C. Newman.
“I know that I’m not being 100 per cent complimentary, but I think you know I could say a heck of a lot more. If I were inclined to be that kind of person, I could be on the attack, I really could,” she said.
She defended herself against allegations of wrongdoing over the fact that she provided one of her office Blackberry devices to her husband, former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer.
“Lots of caucus members have given their Blackberries to their spouses. That’s a fact. When he was caucus chair, Rahim received a number of emails from spouses that clearly identified they were using a parliamentary account. He still has all those emails,” she said.
Ms. Guergis also revealed in the interview that her marriage to Mr. Jaffer went through much turmoil this spring, as he faced a series of allegations of unregistered lobbying. Mr. Jaffer has also been cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the RCMP.
“There was a lot of yelling and screaming going on, a lot of questions, but we made it through that process,” she said. “I went up one side of my husband and down the other for weeks, months on end, to make sure that he was not lying to me, that he had told me the truth. I needed to go through that process with him. I’d wanted time away to figure things out, but it was more appropriate for me to stay and to work through it.”
