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.
