Article content

Police believe two top Ontario Liberals violated the province’s Election Act when they tried to muscle one of their own loyalists out of a byelection race in Sudbury.

Patricia Sorbara was Wynne’s deputy chief of staff until she left the public payroll to lead the Liberals’ 2018 re-election campaign in September. Gerry Lougheed is a party potentate in Sudbury, operator of a chain of funeral homes and a member of the police services board. The Ontario Provincial Police have charged them both with bribery under the province’s Election Act.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or David Reevely: Ontario Liberal party CEO, top Sudbury fundraiser charged with violating Elections Act Back to video

Photo by Sudbury Police Services Board

Both have said they never broke the law.

Sorbara, the architect of Wynne’s unlikely 2014 win, will step down from her campaign job as she faces two bribery counts, the premier said Tuesday. It being unseemly to have your elections chief facing charges for allegedly manipulating an election.

Sorbara and Lougheed are due in court Nov. 21, the OPP say, which is four days after byelections in two ridings, including in Ottawa. The charges against her people shouldn’t matter, Wynne said.

“We are engaged in by-elections, (and) that is separate and apart from anything else that might go on in terms of these allegations and these charges. We’ll remain focused on those strong candidates we have in Niagara West-Glanbrook and Ottawa-Vanier and we’ll focus on running the best campaigns possible,” Wynne said.

Let’s review. A few months after the 2014 general election, the New Democrat who’d won Sudbury decided provincial politics weren’t for him and quit. The Liberals, favoured to win the seat back, had persuaded popular federal NDP MP Glenn Thibeault to leave the House of Commons and run for them. But the guy who’d lost for the provincial Liberals in 2014, Andrew Olivier, also wanted to run again. The party wanted Thibeault to glide to the nomination, so Sorbara and Lougheed worked on Olivier to get him out of the race.

Olivier is partly paralyzed and records conversations because he can’t take notes. He released tapes of Sorbara and Lougheed variously asking, cajoling and bullying — and urging him to think of other ways he might want to be involved with the party and the government, including in paid jobs. He might even work in Thibeault’s constituency office, Sorbara suggested, rather insultingly.