When Prime Minister Stephen Harper named first-time federal MP Leona Aglukkaq to his cabinet in late 2008, he couldn't have imagined the roller-coaster ride that lay ahead for the rookie health minister.
A global influenza pandemic. A worldwide shortage of medical isotopes sparked by a broken Canadian reactor. Attacks from a political ally.
These political time bombs landed with an ugly crash on the desk of a 41-year-old new mother from Nunavut who had just become Canada's first Inuk cabinet minister and wasn't seasoned in the bare-knuckles arena of federal politics.
"My son started talking and walking while I was managing a pandemic," Aglukkaq said recently.
"I learned to value the little time I have with my son."
Beyond that, Aglukkaq reveals little about how she coped with her year of living dangerously.
At first, pundits assumed she was in cabinet to shore up the female headcount. Also, she was from Nunavut, which the Tories had finally taken. Her meek comportment and inability to answer questions without a script played to early impressions of a woman in over her head.
CRITICISM
Fellow cabinet rookie Lisa Raitt captured the thought in a taped criticism of Aglukkaq accidentally made public.
"I really hope she never gets anything hot" to handle, Raitt warned.
Enter H1N1.
Aglukkaq knows precisely how many press briefings she presided over on H1N1: 49.
Her rule of thumb was simple: "I asked myself the question -- how would Canadians want their minister to respond to a pandemic, and I knew then that what was important to me was to get the facts, to communicate the common sense approach. As an individual at the receiving end, I would want as much information (as possible)."
She added: "As an ordinary Canadian, I would want my minister and this government to respond to a pandemic without playing the party politics of it all."
Fat chance. Opposition MPs mauled the government after body bags were sent to Manitoba First Nations communities.
An investigation concluded there had been no ill will in the act. An angry Aglukkaq decried as "fear-mongering" the Liberals' subsequent mailing of pamphlets featuring body bags and a picture of a young child to First Nations.
Health Canada came under fire for not rolling out vaccine fast enough, for not making an unadjuvanted version available quickly, and for saying it might take until Christmas to immunize everyone who wanted a shot.
But everyone who wanted it did get the needle. As the pandemic dissipated, so did the criticism.
Meanwhile, other challenges loomed.
Canada still has no long-term fix to the medical isotope shortage, and Liberal senators altered a consumer-product safety bill that Aglukkaq championed.
But if Aglukkaq has been battered by 2009, it doesn't show.
"Just managing through this has been rewarding, very challenging," she said.
"You know that at the end of the day you're making a difference for Canadians."
CHRISTINA.SPENCER@SUNMEDIA.CA
