Party of One (27 page)

The RCMP investigators also noted in their record of the interview, “Hamilton is aware of events involving Jaffer and Guergis at the 2008 Winnipeg Conservative Party convention. These events would be consistent with allegations and lend credibility to them.” What Hamilton may have been referring to was a “wedding social,” a tradition unique to Manitoba,
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thrown for Rahim and Helena by their friend and political colleague Rod Bruinooge, the Conservative MP for Winnipeg South. It was a Saturday night bash at the Delta Hotel featuring the Boogie Nights Band. There was only one problem, clearly not understood by those not from Manitoba. Attendees were charged admission, and it became an issue that the money may have been going into the pockets of Jaffer and Guergis. “I cringe at the thought of this still today,” Guergis told me. “When we figured this out, we insisted that it go to a charity. I never organized it, did not know there were tickets sold—I should have paid closer attention. I just wanted to help Rod. A wedding social with hundreds of my closest friends I never met before is what I called it. I was not keen on it from the start and only agreed because Rod asked me. This had potential in politics to be a big issue.”

Though Arthur Hamilton scrupulously avoided divulging any information that was “privileged,” about Winnipeg or anything else, he didn’t leave much doubt in the investigators’ minds as to what he thought about the ethics and judgment of either Guergis or Jaffer. Referring to Helena Guergis, Hamilton told the investigators, “Not only does Helena tolerate Jaffer hanging out with escorts, and prostitutes, but there’s apparently video of her snorting cocaine off the breast of a prostitute. I’ve made no verification of that.” (The allegation was not true.) Hamilton even alerted the investigators to a recent story in the press that they might have missed because of the Jaffer/Guergis affair’s domination of the news: “Uh, missed last week in the, in all of the press flurry, and I
think possibly even before the
Toronto Star
article came out, there was a small little story about Mr. Jaffer potentially stealing money from the CONSERVATIVE caucus fund. You’ll remember that he was the chair of the CONSERVATIVE caucus before his defeat in the 2008 election. Um, the allegation in the paper was that Mr. Jaffer had taken an amount of money from that caucus fund.”

Though not reported publicly, the amount of money taken from the caucus fund by Jaffer after he lost the election of 2008 was $4,408.50. The Conservative Party said that Jaffer took the money without authority and tried to justify it with receipts submitted in 2009 to cover expenses he claims go back to the period of time when he was caucus chair. Jaffer had a meeting with the PMO’s chief of staff, Guy Giorno, over the matter, including the allegation that Rahim had stolen the money. Guergis wrote to the MP making that charge, Guy Lauzon. “I told him he was not the judge and jury and that he should consider what his comments would mean for the government if he were to keep telling people his version.” The dispute was never resolved.
¹¹

Investigators noted in their record of the interview, “Hamilton opines that, in view of the fact that Jaffer has personal business interests and that Guergis uses her office to lobby, both violate the Conflict of Interest Act and the Member’s Code.” Before Hamilton’s interview ended, he had a question of his own for the investigators: “Does the RCMP have any, um, expectation, obviously I’ve made no comment in the press, the CONSERVATIVE PARTY, the Prime Minister’s Office, are not making any comment about my actions. I assume my meeting with you is not going to be disclosed unless there is some extraordinary requirement that the RCMP do so?” “Uh, you’re right. Um, all our investigation, we’re keeping that for ourselves,” Staff Sergeant St-Jacques replied.

And so it went—for three solid months.The RCMP Commercial Crime Section interviewed every staff member, including the many
drivers of Helena Guergis, looking for proof she had misused public resources or improperly shared them with her husband, offshored money, or committed fraud. The investigators delved into seven companies involved in the accusations, among them Greenpower Generation, Wright Tech Systems, Green Rite Solutions, and International Strategic Investments. They worked up financial and real estate profiles of both Guergis and Jaffer. They checked the couple out on CPIC, an information database maintained by the RCMP, and FINTRAC, Canada’s financial intelligence unit.
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They even interviewed Ken Murray Cook, the former Canadian ambassador in Guatemala, and also Canada’s high commissioner to Belize. They wanted to know if any meetings had taken place on the couple’s official trip to Belize in 2008, other than what was on the official program. The ambassador had witnessed none.

And so, on July 2, 2010, the chief superintendent of criminal operations in “A” Division, Serge Therriault, wrote a letter to the PMO staffer who had forwarded Derrick Snowdy’s allegations to the RCMP on behalf of the prime minister—Stephen Harper’s principal secretary, Ray Novak:

This is further to your correspondence to Commissioner Elliott of April 9th, 2010 pertaining to allegations of fraud, extortion, obtaining benefits by false pretences, and involvement in prostitution against former Conservative MP Helena Guergis and Mr. Rahim Jaffer.

This letter is to inform you that the RCMP has completed its investigation of your complaint of alleged criminal wrongdoing.

The investigation disclosed no evidence to support a charge under the Criminal Code. This determination was made with the benefit of legal advice from the Ministry of the Attorney-General for the Province of Ontario. . . .

After a very thorough, three-month, seven-person investigation by the national police force into the allegations against Guergis and Jaffer, the RCMP had found absolutely nothing to support charges against the couple.

If the PMO had done due diligence, it might not have climbed aboard the hearsay train so quickly. Just the year before making his shocking claims, Derrick Snowdy had declared personal bankruptcy with $13 million in liabilities, including $2 million owed to Revenue Canada. Snowdy’s source for the allegations against Guergis and Jaffer—Nazim Gillani—was under police investigation for fraud at the time of Snowdy’s discussions with him. He also claimed to have laundered money for the Hells Angels, had been fined for breaking the Income Tax Act in British Columbia, and had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon— a .22-calibre pistol.

Despite being fully cleared by an exhaustive RCMP criminal investigation, which generated a report more than 2,900 pages long, to Guergis, exoneration felt a lot like guilt. Although the prime minister had said that Guergis would sit as an independent in the House of Commons pending the outcomes of the RCMP investigation, she remained in exile. Harper wouldn’t take her back and seemed not to care that he had put two people through public hell for what turned out to be nothing.

Ray Novak had described Snowdy’s allegations in his letter to the commissioner of the RCMP this way: “I have been informed that Mr. Snowdy states that he has collected evidence to corroborate his allegations.” Compare that to what Derrick Snowdy said in testimony in front of the Government Operations Committee when the matter came before Parliament: “I have no evidence, or no information with respect to the conduct of Ms. Guergis in my possession or knowledge.” That is the same answer Snowdy gave to
the ethics commissioner on the day Guergis was fired—and why there was no ethics investigation at that time.

It was an embarrassing fiasco. The Harper government had to come up with a justification for its crimeless punishment of Helena Guergis, who was out of cabinet and out of caucus. After all, when foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier left a briefcase of secret documents at his girlfriend’s apartment, he lost his place in cabinet but not in caucus. Stephen Harper couldn’t say that Guergis was thrown out because she had broken the law; the RCMP confirmed she hadn’t. He couldn’t say that she was ejected because she had used her ministerial letterhead to recommend the services of a constituent to another level of government; the late finance minister Jim Flaherty had been cited for exactly the same ethical breach, except that he was writing to a quasi-judicial body, the CRTC. Flaherty remained in cabinet and caucus. And if being under investigation by an officer of Parliament justified dismissal, then why hadn’t Lisa Raitt and Dean Del Mastro been thrown out of caucus when they were under investigation?
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The question was stubborn and needed answering: why was Helena Guergis cast into the outer darkness? In the end, the Harper government turned to low comedy. “Dean Del Mastro came out of caucus and gave an interview where he said that there was a standard in the Conservative caucus that I didn’t meet,” Guergis told me. “He knew what was coming down the pike for him [Elections Canada charges]—they knew even before the last election—and he said that. I let him have it.”

Helena Guergis isn’t shy about saying who she holds responsible for the injustice she has suffered: “I am no angel, but I never used coke and I’ve never even been in a strip club. Harper and his henchmen used to their advantage sexism and the acceptance of sexism to manipulate. Everyone fell for it. I was not even human,
just something to kick around for a couple of years. The media disgust me as much as Harper does—they were stupid. Harper used them to carry out his plan and they still can’t see it. Rahim was a private person at the time of his arrest,
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and the media and Stephen made sure the whole country wanted to attack me for it. And they still think it is for me to answer for another person. Well, it is not.”

ten

FAREWELL DIPLOMACY

T
he elegant Ottawa house on North River Road looks across the street to the river, a fitting view for a man who was immersed in the flow of the world’s great events for thirty-eight years as a senior member of Canada’s foreign service.

Paul Heinbecker, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, answers the door wearing an open-necked shirt and chinos. He leads me into a dining room decorated with treasures from his most important diplomatic posting: Turkey. Most important, yes, for it was in Ankara that he met and married his wife, Ay
ş
e Köymen, who added a new culture and two daughters, Yasemin and Céline, to his life.

We make our way through the house to a deck overlooking the back garden, where anything capable of blooming is gaudily ablaze in the afternoon sun. Sitting around a table of Turkish treats and a cool pitcher of ice tea, I look into the face of benign fatigue belonging to the man who helped end the Kosovo War and kept Canada from blundering into Iraq with President Bush and his coalition of the misguided.

Before speaking, he ponders my question about the state of Canadian diplomacy under Stephen Harper. Heinbecker had grappled with the diplomat’s concerns: the burden of talking when others want to fight, of compromising when antagonists prefer to stand fast, and of persevering in these delicate arts when things appear hopeless. In a voice alternately soft and steely, a struggle declares itself. It is an argument between the seasoned diplomat not given to making unflattering judgments about his own government, and the troubled professional who can find no other way.

“Canada’s diplomacy is hugely different under Harper,” Heinbecker responds. “The neo-conservative idea of foreign policy is about flexing military muscle. It’s about free-trade deals. It is a reversal of our history. We used to be advocates of constructive internationalism, we used to work hard to make that work. That’s why our advice and our particular insight were so sought after by other countries. Now we are a country with baggage. Those invitations to counsel others and to take part in that international meeting of the minds don’t get issued.
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We have become outliers. We are seen as more American than the Americans, more Israeli than Likud. Given what our foreign policy has become, I would not have joined the service today if I were a young man.” It is a surprising declaration only until Heinbecker supplies the context. He judges the prime minister’s foreign policy—a kind of international morality play directed by Stephen Harper—through the lens of the diplomatic corps he entered in 1965 and left in 2004. These were not just different times but different planets.

Attracted by the feats of Lester Pearson, who found a way to restrain the dogs of war amidst the powder keg of Suez in 1956, Heinbecker joined the foreign service straight out of what was then called Waterloo Lutheran University, now Wilfrid Laurier University. He was the son of a father who worked in the Dominion Tire Factory, and his mother sold products out of her
house to help put him through university. He rose steadily in the department with postings to Stockholm, Paris, Washington, and Ankara. Much later he served as ambassador to Germany and then in 2000, to the United Nations.

The career diplomat’s résumé is a blue-ribbon list of the big files. He was the most important policy advisor to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the Iraq War, chief negotiator of the Kyoto Protocol to the International Climate Change Convention, and head of the Canadian task force on the conflict in Zaire. Over his career, he served three prime ministers of two different political stripes.

The first was Pierre Trudeau, a man Heinbecker found was not a “people person” —much like Stephen Harper. But there was an enormous difference between the Liberal and Conservative leaders. Trudeau entered discussions and debates with gusto, while Harper rejected, sometimes boorishly, views that didn’t square with his own. For Harper, it was a trait that went back to his days as head of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC). After firing a senior member of the NCC for disagreeing with him, Harper told another staffer that they should burn the man’s chair—an incident related in the memoir
Loyal to the Core
by former NCC employee and now political consultant Gerry Nicholls.

Trudeau didn’t want to burn your chair, just put your ideas through the crucible of that subtle, Jesuitical mind. One day in Trudeau’s office, the prime minister made the point that he could get away with lecturing others on international affairs because Canada did not spend big dollars on the military and wasn’t a bully. Heinbecker espoused the opposite view. Precisely because Canada didn’t invest in its armed forces, it left the country without any clout with those nations that were “doing the heavy lifting.” Trudeau debated the issue with his speech writer and concluded that Heinbecker’s position was not persuasive. Heinbecker’s nerves tingled. “I worried for a bit that I had shit on the prime minister’s
carpet with what I said. He didn’t see it that way. We just had different views and that was fine by him.”