Rona Ambrose is leaving federal politics as a great example of just how far an intelligent, progressive, feminist woman can climb in the current Conservative Party of Canada.

Funny — that was her reputation before the Conservatives took power in 2006, too.

It’s that interlude in between — Ambrose’s experience in power — that is worth some reflection today as Parliament loses one of its most-admired female politicians. It’s a story about how difficult it was (and still is) for women politicians, of any partisan stripe, to earn that respect.

I got to know Ambrose more than a decade ago, when she landed on Parliament Hill in the spring of 2004 and I had been asked by the old Saturday Night magazine to do a profile on her. (The article appeared in one of the last, if not the last, issue of that magazine in 2005, as I vaguely recall.)

Ambrose was part of a new generation of young MPs, lured to public office by Stephen Harper’s promise to put a new stamp on a political party dominated by older, white men.

Sound familiar? Justin Trudeau didn’t invent the idea of shaking up Canadian political parties with “generational change.”

Ambrose was just 35 years old when she took up elected politics — a smart and well-travelled rookie politician, more policy wonk than partisan. Having spent part of her childhood in Brazil, she was more fluent in Portuguese and Spanish than she was in French, but still more bilingual than most typical Conservative MPs from the West.

She had been working in the Alberta public service, putting her education to good use: a master’s in gender studies from the University of Victoria and a master’s in political science from the University of Alberta. She also had done volunteer work in Edmonton with women’s shelters and groups fighting violence against women.

Ambrose had been introduced to Conservative politics, and to Harper, by the much-admired James Rajotte, another up-and-coming young MP from Edmonton (who left politics before the last election.) Once upon a time, Ambrose and Rajotte were both held up as representatives of a new brand of Conservatism that Harper was promising to bring to Ottawa … and both would find their ministerial careers dead-ended by that same Conservative leader.

Rajotte, despite his role as Harper’s caucus chair for the leadership and as one of his earliest supporters, never made it to cabinet. Ambrose did — but her rocky start in the environment portfolio must have prompted her to wonder whether her old friend James was the lucky one.

I recall walking through the old press club one afternoon in the early months of Harper’s tenure in 2006 and being told that a book launch had been abruptly cancelled. A scientist with Environment Canada had been told by his bosses that he wasn’t allowed to publicize his new novel about climate change.

Whatever made political life unfriendly to female rookie ministers such as Ambrose a decade ago is still obviously a force today, no matter how far Trudeau’s government says the world has progressed under its feminist flag. Whatever made political life unfriendly to female rookie ministers such as Ambrose a decade ago is still obviously a force today, no matter how far Trudeau’s government says the world has progressed under its feminist flag.

Wait, what? Ambrose had done that?

This was still early enough in Harper’s tenure that it was possible to email ministers directly. I tapped out a “what the?” message to Ambrose on my BlackBerry and she promptly wrote me back, with some boilerplate words about policy and rules. I didn’t get the impression that the book launch ban was her decision.

That brief exchange, though, was a portent of what would happen to a strong rookie female politician in power. The Rona Ambrose we’ve been seeing for the past 18 months — feisty and funny — is a far cry from the minister who learned that the best survival trick in Harper’s cabinet was to stay out of the limelight and do what one is told. That survival strategy did not disappear with Conservative rule, either.

Over the first two years of the Conservatives’ first mandate, we watched the Ambrose we knew fade into obscurity. By 2008, another exchange led me to believe that she was gone forever.

It was June, 2008, and Parliament was soon to rise for the summer — maybe for longer, given the rumours of a fall election. Ambrose’s assistant was offering up the minister for interviews with women journalists in the Commons’ foyer and I happily added my name to the list, hoping to get an interesting story from this once-interesting politician.

To my surprise, however, Ambrose was calling journalists to do some damage control for the team. By now, as the intergovernmental affairs minister, she was being hauled out to read lines in support of Conservative MP Ken Epp’s bill that would recognize the rights of the fetus — the Unborn Victims of Crime Act. Pro-choice advocates feared that this was a step towards anti-abortion legislation.

Ambrose, the good team player, was calling reporters and delivering the same script, no doubt written by PMO. As a feminist and women’s rights advocate, she said, she wasn’t worried about Epp’s bill and no one else should be, either. “Our government has no interest, no intention of reopening the abortion debate,” she said.

A couple of months later, we’d also learn that the government had no interest in Epp’s bill either. At the end of summer, and with an election looming, Harper’s government formally walked away from the contentious legislation, obviously calculating it would hurt the Conservatives’ re-election chances.

So yes, Ambrose’s political capital had been used for nothing.

Some critics of the Conservatives might be tempted to say, ‘Good thing those days are over, eh?’ Not so fast. Watching Maryam Monsef flail in her old democratic-reform portfolio last year, or seeing Government House Leader Bardish Chagger sticking to her robotic script each day in the Commons, I keep seeing Ambrose’s old life flashing before our eyes.

Whatever made political life unfriendly to female rookie ministers such as Ambrose a decade ago is still obviously a force today, no matter how far Trudeau’s government says the world has progressed under its feminist flag.

I hope we haven’t heard the last of Rona Ambrose. She’s turned her own short-term losses into long-term political success — a not-unhelpful skill for anyone in politics, or life, for that matter. Like many others, I wish we’d had more of a chance to get to know the Ambrose we saw at the beginning and at the end of her career in public life.

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