In 1992, Helene Guergis won the title "Miss Huronia" in the Miss Huronia Pageant and participated as Huronia's representative in the year's "Miss Oktoberfest Pageant", and the Canadian Search for Miss Universe. CBC photo
Helena Guergis's political career was supposed to take a much different path.
A beauty queen who became minister of state for the status of women, a local girl who ended up sitting right behind Stephen Harper in the House of Commons. Ms. Guergis was supposed to be on the way up, not on the way out - defrocked as cabinet minister, expelled from caucus, the subject of a police investigation and a probe by the ethics commissioner.
Back home, she still has her defenders.
"This is hot on everybody's mind right now, but it'll all pass," Carl Banting, 67, owner of Wolf's Den Sporting Supplies in Utopia, 80 kilometres north of Toronto, said of the storm that gathered around Ms. Guergis in recent months. He's a family friend.
"I've talked to a lot of people around here and they are true blue, and a couple of chicken-shit gaffes aren't going to change that."
We don't know exactly what those gaffes were. We don't know why Mr. Harper saw fit to so thoroughly ostracize her. We don't know what, if anything, his actions had to do with Ms. Guergis's husband, ex-MP Rahim Jaffer, who denies allegations that he told questionable business associates he could get access to government funds.
What we do know is that Helena Guergis is a woman who sees things her own way, who pursued unconventional paths to advance her career, and who confronted anyone who she felt had crossed her.
Mr. Banting attributes this strength to her upbringing in "a God-fearing family" descended from her great-grandfather, a Turkish-born Christian Assyrian who trained as a Presbyterian minister and landed in the Angus area in 1949.
Self-made and hard working, subsequent generations became well versed in the cut and thrust of politics at the local level.
"Nothing was handed to them," Mr. Banting said of the Guergis family (pronounced "Georges").
Angus was a rough-and-tumble "one-horse town" on damp, low-lying land next to Canadian Forces Base Borden, 20 kilometres west of Barrie, the nearest city. As a result, "There used to be a stigma attached to it; nobody wanted to be in Angus," Mr. Banting said.
The Guergis clan became fixtures in business, land development and local politics. Ms. Guergis's grandfather, George, was reeve of surrounding Essa Township. Her uncle was a deputy reeve, two cousins are local mayors and her younger sister, her only sibling, is a township councillor.
To build her profile as a young woman, Ms. Guergis entered the Miss Huronia pageant three times, starting in 1990 - an odd choice for a future status of women minister at a time when feminists routinely decried pageants as sexist and degrading; odder still for the fact she pursued her sash-and-tiara dreams while working as a rape crisis volunteer and marching in Barrie's Take Back the Night rally, activities more typical of those opposed to pageants.
After she won the Miss Huronia title in 1992, Ms. Guergis, then 23, told a local newspaper that the pageant was no beauty contest; it was more like applying for a job and had little to do with looks.
"This was my third time [in the pageant] The first year, I won the swimsuit competition and I wasn't even in the final eight contestants, so that should tell you something about the pageant," she reasoned.
Ms. Guergis went on to conduct a fundraising walk, with half the proceeds earmarked for women's shelters and the other half for her entry to the Canadian Search for Miss Universe pageant. She wound up suing its organizer, Sylvia Stark, for inflating the entry fee.
"She's her own person," Mr. Banting said. "She's open to listening to other ideas, but she's pretty firm in her convictions."
After taking a real estate course and running a bed-and-bath business in a small Angus plaza her father partly owned, Ms. Guergis went to work as an assistant for Joe Tascona, the local Progressive Conservative MPP. That experience landed her a job for three years with Janet Ecker, a senior minister in the Mike Harris provincial government of the late 1990s.
"She was bright, she was talented and she was willing to work hard and learn," Ms. Ecker said.
Her good looks were obvious, but didn't help her much, "not in the environment that we worked in," Ms. Ecker said. "You had to pull your weight."
Geoff Norquay, a former communications director for Mr. Harper, wrote speeches for Ms. Ecker and remembers meeting Ms. Guergis during that time. "She was responsible for financial institutions and she was bright, competent, capable and quiet," Mr. Norquay said.
Ms. Guergis served three terms on the Progressive Conservative provincial executive, and in 2003, was the Tory candidate in Toronto's Trinity-Spadina riding, which even the most optimistic Conservative recognized was unwinnable.
The next year, carrying the banner of the newly unified right under the Conservative party, she bumped off Liberal Paul Bonwick to take the federal seat in Simcoe-Grey by a slim 100 votes.
"While Helena was away working [for the provincial Tories] things changed," Mr. Banting said, referring to an influx of new residents to the riding, many from Toronto, an hour to the south. "When she decided to run, she was like a new person coming into the area for many people here."
One of relatively few women in the federal Conservative caucus, Ms. Guergis stood out from the day she arrived in Ottawa. Despite her at-times girlish voice, she appeared determined not to be taken as a lightweight, and in Opposition, she delivered scathing attacks on the Liberals for supporting projects in China.
When the Tories won the election of 2006, she was appointed parliamentary secretary to the minister of international trade and was then promoted to secretary of state for foreign affairs and international trade and secretary of state for sport.
Although critics said she lacked the experience for these jobs, Mr. Harper nonetheless saw fit to promote Ms. Guergis to her cabinet post after the 2008 vote.
On the personal side, meanwhile, Ms. Guergis broke up with the fiancé who had been her campaign manager in 2004 and began a romance with Mr. Jaffer, who was first elected as a Reform MP at age 25. He proposed in 2007, and on Oct. 15 the following year, one day after Mr. Jaffer lost his seat to an NDP candidate, the couple scrapped initial wedding plans and eloped in Edmonton.
Lately, that low-budget wedding has been looking costlier by the day, at least to Ms. Guergis's political fortunes. And her own problems have exasperated her party colleagues both in Ottawa and in Simcoe-Grey. Conservative riding association officials say annoyed members were calling to demand a vote on Ms. Guergis's nomination even before she was expelled from caucus yesterday.
But Sandi Macdonald, a local councillor who owns a health goods store in Angus, said Ms. Guergis has been doing her job in Simcoe-Grey.
"I'm sorry, but she's delivered on her promises to us," said Ms. Macdonald, who has known Ms. Guergis from childhood and suggested her day-to-day accomplishments have been obscured by negative media portrayals.
"If people have seen the way Helena is with seniors, with women's issues and those less fortunate, they would see the real Helena," Ms. Macdonald said.
For now, it seems, no one is seeing the real Helena.
"She isn't here right now," her mother, Linda Guergis, said on the phone from Angus late this week. The strain of her family's ordeal was evident as her voice rose in a plaintive plea for privacy.
"She hasn't done anything wrong," Mrs. Guergis said. "You want to quote that? Go ahead. Goodbye."