Conservative politicians are cokeheads too

[alexd]

Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer has been charged with impaired driving and possession of cocaine, Ontario Provincial Police said Wednesday.

Police said they stopped a Ford Escape that had been travelling at high speed through the village of Palgrave, northwest of Toronto. The officer who made the stop noticed the odour of alcohol on the driver's breath, police said in a news release.

A resident of Angus, Ont., about 100 kilometres north of Toronto, Jaffer is due to appear in criminal court in Orangeville on Oct. 19. His driver's licence has been suspended for 90 days.

Jaffer, 37, is the husband of Helena Guergis, the current Conservative MP for the riding of Simcoe-Grey, and the minister of state for the status of women.

"I take this very seriously," Guergis said in statement. "I love my husband. I will wait for further information before I make any comment."

Former Reform/Canadian Alliance MP Ian McClelland, who presided over Jaffer's wedding last October, told CBC News he was "surprised, sorry and very disappointed' at the news.

Deborah Grey, another former Edmonton Conservative MP, who lives now on Vancouver Island, also said she was disappointed.

"You get older, you're supposed to be smarter," Grey said.

Elected in the Alberta riding of Edmonton-Strathcona in 1997 as a member of the Reform party, Jaffer held the riding until his surprising defeat by an NDP candidate in the 2008 election.

In May, Jaffer's most recent political ambitions were thwarted when the Conservative party moved ahead with a nomination process in his old Edmonton riding, even though he had appealed for more time. However, Jaffer didn't express much remorse about the apparent end of his political career, saying he was concentrating on his MBA degree.

Born in Uganda, Jaffer moved to Edmonton as a boy when his family fled the brutal regime of Idi Amin. He was highly touted as a bilingual, visible-minority member of the Reform, Canadian Alliance and Conservative party caucuses.

However, his time in politics was not without a misstep.

In 2001, while a member of the Canadian Alliance party, Jaffer apologized to the House of Commons after admitting an aide impersonated him on a live national radio call-in show based in Vancouver. The aide resigned after the station confronted the two men about the hoax.

The party suspended Jaffer from his duties as chair of its small-business advisory committee, and he was demoted to the back benches in the House of Commons.