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It’s game on again between Beauty and the Beast — the star-crossed Helena Guergis and a prime minister grown so ruthless he is beginning to frighten even his own people.

The Conservative Party of Canada is coming after Guergis in the wake of a court case she lost alleging a conspiracy to have her fired, leaving her owing $38,000 in costs. True, the money is owed. But the legal boa constrictor is being applied with remarkable vigor.

Guergis’s offer of $30 a month has been rejected by the CPC. Unless she comes up with a satisfactory payment plan, the CPC will pay for a financial inquisition into the affairs of two Conservative politicians who were once the glamour couple of the capital — Helena Guergis and Rahim Jaffer.

In fact, the CPC has already taken a look at a lot of possible ways to get the money the court judgement allotted to this defendant and others in Guergis’s unsuccessful lawsuit.

They have mused that Guergis’s parents can pay the judgement against their daughter. They have pondered getting their money from the MP’s pensions the couple will be receiving in the future. They have even calculated that Guergis will be earning a good salary soon when she graduates from law school at the University of Alberta. They have wondered what happened to the proceeds of the sale of their Ottawa house, which went for $1,000,000. Less the mortgage, surely there was equity there?

But mostly they have focused on properties presumably owned by Guergis’s husband, Rahim Jaffer. There are three condominiums, all in Toronto.

One is on Wynford Drive. It cost $385,000 and has a $308,000 mortgage. Another is at Village Green Square. It cost $252,964 and carries a mortgage of $196,875. The last property is on Bamburgh Circle. It is allegedly half-owned by Rahim Jaffer and has no registered mortgage.

In other words, the CPC believes there is more than ample equity to allow Helena Guergis to pay off her court costs — even though she is not the registered co-owner of any of the properties. Everything has been figured out: As a spouse, she is entitled to a half-interest in each of the properties. Welcome to the mean streets of politics and the law.

Unless she comes up with a satisfactory payment plan, the CPC will pay for a financial inquisition into the affairs of two Conservative politicians who were once the glamour couple of the capital.

But does the party have it right?

Here is the reaction of the woman who once dined with the prime minister and went to the movies with Stephen Harper and Laureen, zigzagging through Ottawa traffic in four black government SUVs. Helena, by the way, rode in the PM’s vehicle.

“My goodness we are loaded,” she wrote to her lawyer regarding the assessment of her financial status. “Let me guess, Arthur Hamilton or Derek Snowdy’s stellar detective work again. Or maybe it was Lisa Raitt. None of the properties are my husband’s. I repeat, not one of them. Funny, the night Rahim’s charges became public I was shocked — and turned to Axelle (Pellerin, former chief of staff) and said ‘there is another Rahim Jaffer — it has to be him’. I explained the sale of the Ottawa house and am happy to supply the sale documents, etc.

“They forget that I did have to pay to live for the last almost three years. I paid a LOT in legal fees before I ever walked through the door! Can’t do any of that on fresh air and sunshine … oh wait, I tried that.

“I live in my brother-in-law’s home. I have nothing and my husband has very little and anything he does have was bought long before I was in the picture — good luck on that front. I don’t give a sweet ass shit if they want to waste their f—-n time coming here. They will find nothing because we got nothing. I trust this information, if not helpful, is at least amusing.”

Spoken like the girl who, as a kid, once threw another kid who was beating up her sister over the boards of the local rink in Angus, Ont. Spoken like a kid who was called “a dirty, slimy Iraqi who should go back to where she came from,” but stayed and prospered.

Back in those days, her parents owned a furniture store and were considered rich. She remembered as a girl that when their house was raided by police and provincial revenue officers looking for proof of income tax evasion, they even searched her bedroom. “I had just started my period — I was an early bloomer, and they even went through my very first box of maxi-pads. I was standing there in my pyjamas and asked if I could put on my robe. They said no.”

“Our skin was too dark for a lot of them,” she said. “And on top of that I had this little, tiny voice that everyone made fun of.” Later, after she unexpectedly won the Conservative nomination, won her seat, and then got appointed to cabinet, skin colour once again became an issue in her hometown.

“I was asked by a constituent why I had brought my driver with me to town — the brown man. I told them that’s not my driver, that’s my husband.”

In those days of dizzying ascent Helena Guergis was awarded the “special chair” behind and to the side of Stephen Harper. The special chair meant that a beautiful woman would always be on camera nodding in agreement as the PM gave his non-answers. The party even had an answer for her small voice — voice training lessons in Montreal that would help her to project with more authority when she spoke.

“In question period rehearsal, Stephen, other cabinet ministers and Jenni Byrne would sit there watching. Sometimes some of them would coach. When I lapsed into my real voice, because it was hard to project that phoney one for too long, Peter Van Loan would urge, ‘Helena … Big Girl voice, Big Girl voice.”

Life was good when Stephen Harper had a use for her. There was the four-level condo in Ottawa with a kitchen fit for Jamie Oliver, the driver (she’d asked not to have one) and enough money to spend $300 a month colouring her luxuriant hair.

Although she was planning to leave cabinet herself to have a baby and sit as an MP, she never got the chance. Her husband Rahim was arrested under sensational circumstances — drunk driving, speeding and possession of cocaine.

‘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. He knew what was coming down the pike for him — they knew even before the last election — and he said that. I let him have it.’

“The prime minister called me and said, ‘From one friend to another, it’s time you knew what your husband’s been doing.'”

Then came all the lurid allegations — stories of offshore bank accounts, and snorting cocaine in strip clubs. Banishment from caucus was not enough. Stephen Harper sent the matter to the RCMP, among others. Helena Guergis’s political career was effectively over.

The odd thing was this: After an exhaustive investigation, the Mounties cleared the former beauty queen of any criminal wrongdoing. As she told me, “I have never even been to a strip club.”

I asked her if she did cocaine. “I’m far from perfect, but the answer is no, never.”

The cocaine possession charge was “withdrawn” against her husband and he ended up facing the music on charges of drunk driving and speeding — serious matters to be sure, but not the stuff of Red Ferraris, private detectives, and stashing cash in offshore bank accounts.

The fall of this power couple has been Shakespearian — and it’s still reverberating throughout the party. (Senator Patrick Brazeau, facing unpaid suspension over his housing expense claims, compared himself to Guergis in a recent tweet.) Rahim Jaffer is still searching for a way back after his head on collision with notoriety, spending a lot of time in a trailer park in Florida. Helena is working on a law degree, keeping a low profile and enjoying the sunshine in her life these days — her three year old son Zavier.

As we walked through the freezing Edmonton night on the way to a lecture by Andrew Coyne, I asked her about how hard it was to watch her colleagues drop her, one by one, including one-time friend Shelley Glover. And that led us to Dean Del Mastro, who remained as the PM’s parliamentary secretary while under investigation by Elections Canada.

“It was hard but there was some funny stuff. 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. He knew what was coming down the pike for him — they knew even before the last election — and he said that. I let him have it.”

In her Big Girl voice.

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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