Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown has tapped a veteran of numerous Tory campaigns — including Kevin O’Leary’s aborted federal leadership bid — to run his election next year.

Andrew Boddington, who was the party’s executive director during former leader Tim Hudak’s ill-fated 2014 campaign, will helm Brown’s effort to become premier.

“As you know, our party is working tirelessly to defeat Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government in the upcoming election,” the leader wrote in an email to Tories on Thursday.

“While everything from hydro to housing costs more under Kathleen Wynne, we will make life more affordable for Ontarians,” he said.

The Tories’ campaign chair is prominent lawyer Walied Soliman, chair of Norton Rose Fulbright LLP and a life-long friend of Brown.

MPP Sylvia Jones (Dufferin-Caledon) and Mississauga-Centre candidate Angely Pacis are the vice-chairs.

Brown said Boddington would run the day-to-day campaign with advertising guru Dan Robertson as his deputy for strategy and current PC executive director Bob Stanley as his deputy for field organization.

Robertson, whose company Indent Communications is making Brown’s ads, was the federal Conservatives’ director of advertising during former prime minister Stephen Harper’s successful 2011 majority win.

The announcement comes 399 days before a June 7, 2018 provincial election that public opinion polls suggest the Tories could win.

Boddington, who managed one-time Brown rival Christine Elliott’s first run for the Tory leadership in 2009, was a key member of O’Leary’s to lead the federal Conservatives.

The reality TV star of ABC’s Shark Tank abandoned his political dream last week after concluding he would not have been able to defeat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the 2019 federal election because he doesn’t speak French.

O’Leary threw his support behind federal Tory front-runner Maxime Bernier and sources said Boddington has since been helping the Quebec MP’s crusade to win that contest later this month.

During the 2011 Ontario election — the Tories’ best showing in the province since 1999 — Boddington served as Hudak’s director of operations and voter contact.