Rona Ambrose has been left to smile pretty for the cameras

JEFFREY SIMPSON
Globe and Mail
December 15, 2006

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose is twisting in the political wind. Her agony will only cheer those who enjoy watching pain.

Ms. Ambrose is likely living her final weeks or days in that portfolio. Her performance in Ottawa has become now the subject of a kind of death watch.

Ms. Ambrose has been in some ways a disappointment as Environment Minister, but that disappointment has not all been of her own making. She inherited huge and complicated files about which the Conservatives had given insufficient thought while in opposition.

One environment file, climate change/global warming, caught the entire government by surprise, for which she carried the can.

What does any minister do when a bunch of caucus members don't believe the science of climate change? Similarly, what does a minister do when the Prime Minister in a highly centralized regime doesn't think the issue terribly critical?

Climate change exposed the ill-preparedness of the Harper government, which for some strange reason 11 months after the election, keeps calling itself "Canada's new government."

The Harperites in opposition knew what they opposed, the Kyoto accord, but not what they favoured. They reckoned the issue would bubble along, of interest largely to environmental lobby groups who seldom vote or persuade anyone else to vote Conservative.

So they had time on their side. A rookie minister would have time on her side, too.

But Ms. Ambrose was not just any rookie minister. She was a woman, and an attractive one, in a world, especially a media world, where a certain amount of sexism regrettably remains.

Soon after Ms. Ambrose's appointment, Maclean's magazine put her on the cover pointing to her attractiveness. Other publications took the same angle. She was asked humiliating and grossly inappropriate questions about why she and her husband did not have children.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. She had landed early in cabinet, before others from her city of Edmonton, in part because she was a woman in a cabinet and party woefully short of them.

From a job as a mid-level civil servant in Alberta, with only a short stint in opposition in Ottawa, Ms. Ambrose landed a portfolio that the government thought would be relatively minor, but turned out to be a political firestorm. She burned through chiefs-of-staff and a deputy minister (although that deputy had previously alienated just about everybody in the civil service), and obviously began struggling.

She was sent abroad and got hammered by some other countries and, of course, environmental groups. She only spoke the truth -- that Canada could not meet its Kyoto targets because the Liberals had been so negligent -- but like the entire government, she had nothing new to announce.

She had nothing to put in the place of fulfilling Kyoto, because the government had no policy. And while it frantically tried to produce one, she was left to be politically assaulted.

The Prime Minister's Office, media control freaks who worry incessantly about the government's "message," came to see her as a weak communicator, although in contrast to some other ministers, she wasn't bad.

Ms. Ambrose's problem, among others, was that she did not ad lib very well. She sometimes could not hide her lack of attention to details of files. She hadn't learned, alas for her, the art of political fog-making, something a few politicians learn at their mother's knee, but most take years to develop.

Now, of course, the PMO has taken over the environment file, including beefing up the climate-change policy that landed dead-on-arrival in Parliament. Ms. Ambrose has been shouldered aside.

Even the old political crooner, former prime minister Brian Mulroney, is calling the government's climate proposals a "work in progress" and warning that the issue could decide the next election. Mr. Mulroney, whose adage used to be that all must sing from the same hymn book, was obviously talking the government's newly discovered line.

That political importance of the environment explains why Mr. Harper has now begun identifying himself with the issue, relegating Ms. Ambrose to the shadows.

Last week, Mr. Harper himself made an announcement about regulating chemicals, which should have been made by the departmental minister, given its modest importance.

Ms. Ambrose attended and did what all ministers in the Harper government must do at photo-ops: nod enthusiastically for the cameras.

jsimpson@globeandmail.com