Former Finance Minister Joe Oliver lost his bid for the Ontario Progressive Conservative nomination in York Centre Sunday night.

The riding membership nominated Roman Baber, a civil and commercial lawyer who worked on Patrick Brown’s leadership campaign, as their 2018 candidate instead.

“A long-time resident of York Centre, Roman understands the opportunities and challenges his community faces,” said PC Leader Patrick Brown in a statement following the nomination contest.

“I would also like to thank the Honourable Joe Oliver on running a great campaign. I am proud that our Party is attracting so many distinguished Ontarians such as Joe, and we thank him for his ongoing commitment to the Progressive Conservative cause,” he said.

Oliver, 76, was Conservative MP for Toronto’s Eglinton—Lawrence riding from 2011 to 2015, serving as both the minister of Natural Resources and the minister of Finance during that term.

He was defeated in 2015, when the Liberals swept to power.

In October, Oliver said running for the PC nomination was “an opportunity to make a real difference.”

“I view this as a pivotal moment in the province’s economic history. I really strongly feel we’ve got to turn things around and I believe that I can contribute to that,” he said, highlighting his experience in capital markets, finance, and economics.

On Sunday, he congratulated Baber on his nomination and said he hopes Baber wins against Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals as part of Brown’s team.

I congratulate Roman Baber on nomination for PC Party in York Centre. Hope he wins against Wynne Lib’ls as part of new Patrick Brown Gov’t. — Joe Oliver (@joeoliver1) January 15, 2017

Liberal MPP Monte Kwinter has represented the York Centre riding since 1999. Before that he served as the MPP for Wilson Heights between 1985 and 1999.

On his website Baber says he has been an “avid Conservative activist” since his undergraduate studies when he served as president of the York University Conservative Club.

Baber lived in the Soviet Union and Israel before moving to Canada and settling in York Centre with his family when he was 15 years old. He is fluent in both Russian and Hebrew, he notes on his website.

The PCs have so far nominated 34 candidates for the 2018 election. Among them are other former Conservative MPs who have been successful in their bids for PC nominations, including Stephen Harper’s former parliamentary secretary Paul Calandra who will represent the PCs in Markham-Stouffville and Daryl Kramp, who will run in Hastings-Lennox and Addington.

But Oliver isn’t the first big-name candidate to be defeated in Ontario PC nominations.

In October, 19-year-old MPP Sam Oosterhooff defeated PC party president and ex-Conservative MP Rick Dykstra to win the nomination for the Niagara-West Glanbrook by-election, which he later won.

Oosterhoff’s upset uncovered divisions within the party over social conservative issues, which some pundits have warned could cause issues for the PCs as the 2018 elections nears.

And just last week ex-MP Bob Dechert’s withdrawal from the Mississauga Erin-Mills PC nomination race last week.

It was unlikely Dechert would have won the nomination, which is scheduled for Jan. 22, after he sold 80 of 2,100 memberships that came in by the cutoff, a PC official told iPolitics.

Dechert, however, told the Toronto Sun that his decision to withdraw stemmed from his “observation of widespread abuse of the process in Mississauga Erin-Mills by multiple persons and a failure by the party to enforce its own rules.”

Similar concerns have been raised over a number of other PC nominations, including the Burlington nomination. The riding’s membership chair Colin Pye filed an appeal seeking to overturn the nomination of ex-MPP Jane McKenna arguing her opponent Jane Michael was treated unfairly. The party subsequently dismissed his appeal.

Derek Duval said he was disqualified from the Glengarry-Prescott-Russell nomination because of his involvement in a video that was filmed during a charity hockey game that shows someone eating poutine off a hockey stick. Party officials apparently mistook the poutine for a hamster.

In the Carleton nomination race, the PCs disqualified two candidates. Michael Nowak, a farmer and mechanical engineer, was disqualified after he made racist comments about now candidate Goldie Ghamari. Jay Tysick, a former senior aide to Ottawa City Councillor Rick Chiarelli and now a managing partner of Faraday Partners, was also disqualified from the race, but was not provided with a reason.