SUDBURY

There was no way she was sitting in the hot seat.

Unlike virtually all witnesses who come to court to testify, Premier Kathleen Wynne remained standing and despite her high heels, never once sat during her four hours of testimony in the bribery trial of two high-ranking Liberals.

She had a message to send: that she was here to testify of her own volition, that she did nothing wrong.

A little nervous at the beginning, Wynne was clearly well-rehearsed: memory loss on any details that could land her in trouble — “I don’t recall the specifics of the conversation” being a common refrain — and then forthright when in less dangerous territory.

The way Wynne told it, she just wanted to keep Andrew Olivier in the “family” after she’d found a better choice to run in the 2015 byelection to take back the Sudbury riding Olivier had failed to win five months earlier. The premier never told her lieutenants to offer him bribes to step aside, no sir. Pat Sorbara, Wynne’s former deputy chief of staff and campaign director, and Gerry Lougheed, a Liberal party fundraiser, have pleaded not guilty to charges under the Ontario Elections Act that they offered incentives to Olivier to withdraw his plans to run and make way for Wynne’s preferred star candidate, Glenn Thibeault, who was defecting from the federal NDP.

Sorbara has also pleaded not guilty to a second charge that to get Thibeault, she allegedly offered paid positions to two of his former NDP riding staff. When asked about Sorbara, Wynne smiled fondly. She’d known of her “excellent reputation” for years and after she joined their campaign in 2014, they spoke daily. The admiration was mutual — even as her former boss was about to reluctantly hang her out to dry, Sorbara smiled in return. That’s what you call a team player.

Olivier, however, was not.

In the 2014 general election, he lost the Sudbury seat held by the Liberals for almost two decades. When the winner resigned five months into his term, Olivier announced that he wanted to try again.

Wynne didn’t want him.

“Andrew Olivier had not been as strong a candidate as I had thought,” she explained.

When she learned the NDP’s Thibeault was interested in switching parties, Wynne was intrigued.

“I thought it was something we should explore,” she said. “We didn’t have a candidate and didn’t have a prospective candidate” who was strong.

When Wynne dispatched Lougheed to speak to Thibeault, she said she gave no instructions on how to woo him. She also denied ever being asked to promise him a cabinet position. That would be “antithetical to how I would want to proceed,” she insisted.

Thibeault was promoted to energy minister in 2016.

After meeting him at her home to discuss his potential candidacy, Wynne was convinced Thibeault was her man.

“I felt that Glenn and I had connected, that we liked each other. I liked the approach he was taking.”

When he agreed to run, she had Lougheed break the news to Olivier that he wouldn’t be running. She then followed up with a phone call of her own. It was the decent thing to do, she said.

“We wanted to keep him involved if we could … and to see if there was a possibility that he would work with us and support Glenn.”

Her aim was party unity, she explained. But even without Olivier’s blessing, she was determined that Thibeault would be her candidate. After an “awkward” conversation, Wynne hung up not knowing what the disappointed Olivier would do.

She tasked Sorbara with following up. Did Wynne give her deputy any direction on what to say or offer?

“There was no instruction,” she said.

As for Thibeault’s requests regarding paid staffers and expenses, she left that with Sorbara as well.

“She did not discuss the specifics with me.”

The subtext? Messy backroom wheeling and dealing was up to her loyal lieutenants.

It was exhausting to watch. Standing on those heels for so many hours, Wynne had a narrow tightrope to walk: Separate herself from any taint of wrongdoing without throwing her good friend, Sorbara, and Lougheed, an important party powerbroker, under the bus.

But try as she might, by the end of her testimony, the smell of road kill was heavy in the air.

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