Then, abruptly, Jaffer’s carriage turned gourd. The NDP captured Edmonton-Strathcona by a little more than 400 votes. Conservative insiders say Jaffer lost the unlosable through sheer laziness. “The story was, and everybody in Edmonton knew it, that Rahim spent too much time having fun and not enough with his constituents,” says one. A few months later, Jaffer asked the Conservative party to stretch a nomination deadline; he was rebuffed. “Why would you give the guy another shot when he had all the opportunity in the world?” one Tory asks.
It’s a question Jaffer doesn’t appear to have asked himself. Though he recently launched Green Power Generation, an alternative energy outfit, with his friend Patrick Glémaud, his affiliation with his party has remained his calling card. His personal website still carries the Conservative logo, and looks strikingly similar to a candidate’s standard online screed. “It just kind of shows how he has not figured out who the hell he is now that he’s not a politician anymore,” says a Conservative. Others believe Jaffer had every intention of getting back into the game. “He still had lots of energy, lots of future and lots of potential left,” says his old boss, Mills. “It was just presumed that there would be another moment.”
That moment now seems far away. Before Jaffer spreads the vast wilderness beyond the Hill. Says Monte Solberg, the former Medicine Hat Tory who retired from public life last fall after 15 years in the House, and a close friend of Jaffer’s: “You’re going from a life where you’re going a hundred miles an hour and you have all the trappings of the job—fly anywhere you want in the country, doors open for you—and all of a sudden you’re doing all these things on your own, it’s coming out of your pocket, people don’t necessarily pick up the phone and call you.”
Perhaps Jaffer, who achieved so much so early, has been at loose ends. Yet there’s another view among some Tories. “It’s the perpetual challenge that Rahim and others have,” says an old pro. “There’s a lot of people who love the guy here, but it’s knowing when you go from frat boy to family man. That was one of the inner demons he was trying to shake.” It was near the end of Ramadan that a Caledon OPP officer spotted a grey Ford Escape speeding through Palgrave, Ont., an hour’s drive from Guergis’s hometown. The officer pulled the SUV over and allegedly smelled alcohol. Later, police say, an officer found cocaine on Jaffer’s person.
Jaffer has returned from scandal before. “Rahim always had, and does still have, that public demeanour of a duck with water going off its back,” says Conservative operative Tim Powers, VP of Ottawa-based Summa Communications. Jaffer released a statement saying he’ll fight the charges. Glémaud says he is doing well and has the support of his wife and family: “This incident showed Rahim the people that are his true friends, that he has some people outside of politics, and some inside, that will stand by his side.” He believes the charges will not stand. “A couple of months from now,” he says, “this thing will be a non-story.” Yet a non-story may also mean the end of the fable.
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