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adrian morrow

Globe and Mail reporter Adrian Morrow.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail

On the afternoon of Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014, a cloudy sub-zero day in Sudbury, Andrew Olivier was at his office when Gerry Lougheed came to see him.

Mr. Olivier, a 36-year-old mortgage agent, was hoping to make history by becoming Ontario's first quadriplegic Member of Provincial Parliament. As the Liberal candidate in the provincial election the previous June, he had come less than 1,000 votes short of this goal, losing to the NDP's Joe Cimino.

Mr. Cimino resigned mere months into his term, and Mr. Olivier was confident of winning the nomination for the by-election to replace him. This time, he was certain, he would take the riding for Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Mr. Lougheed, a businessman who owns a funeral home and chaired the police board, was also a major Liberal fundraiser. Getting some face time with him, Mr. Olivier believed, meant that the nomination meeting would soon be called and he could begin his campaign. He flicked the recorder on his phone and listened.

"This is a significant conversation, my friend," Mr. Lougheed began. "That's why I want to see you eyeball to eyeball on this one."

Their meeting that day set off a chain of events that sparked a police corruption investigation reaching into the centre of power at Queen's Park, led to criminal charges against Mr. Lougheed, and dragged the Premier into an ethical quagmire.

At Mr. Lougheed's first court date, on Nov. 18, his lawyer, Michael Lacy, indicated he wants the case to move swiftly, meaning Ontarians could soon see the political drama that began that day at Mr. Olivier's office play out in a courtroom.

Mr. Lougheed plans to plead not guilty.

"Gerry maintains his innocence and is anxious to vindicate himself through the criminal justice process," a statement from Mr. Lougheed's defence team read. "He is proud of his accomplishments in the community where he has lived his entire life. It would be unfortunate if the fact of the charges stained his well-deserved reputation, as some seem intent on doing."

Added Mr. Lacy in an interview on Thursday: "We maintain that there was no basis to charge him, and we're confident that he will be vindicated."

The case is sure to be watched intently – by the citizens of Sudbury, the province's power brokers in Toronto, and political observers across the country – for what it might reveal about the ethics of the long-governing Liberals and the line between political patronage and criminal corruption.

THE ALLEGED BRIBE

Sitting in Mr. Olivier's office in a strip plaza in Sudbury, a city of 160,000 that sprawls amid evergreen forest and the Canadian shield in Northern Ontario, Mr. Lougheed dropped a bombshell: Ms. Wynne had persuaded the federal NDP MP for the riding, Glenn Thibeault, to run for the Liberal nomination in the by-election. Mr. Thibeault had agreed that very morning.

"That's huge, because it will totally deplete the NDP," Mr. Lougheed said.

But there was a catch. Candidates usually campaigned for the nomination for several weeks, then local Liberals would choose the nominee. Mr. Lougheed said Ms. Wynne wanted Mr. Thibeault swiftly acclaimed without the need for a vote. That meant Mr. Olivier quitting the race.

If Mr. Olivier would co-operate, something might be in it for him.

"The Premier wants to talk to you. We would like to present to you options in terms of appointments, jobs, whatever," Mr. Lougheed said.

He encouraged Mr. Olivier to press the issue. There could be a "reward" for quitting, he said.

"I hate to sound kind of Machiavellian about it, but at the end of the day, if you take the high road on this – what is your reward? What do they say? 'Andrew Olivier took a bullet for us, so what do we give to Andrew Olivier?' And by the way, I've already raised that question," he said.

He walked Mr. Olivier through the sort of questions he could ask: "Politically, what's in it for me? In my long term, short term, is there an appointment, are you going to let me head up a commission? What are you giving me, for me to step down, that is worthwhile?"

In the recording, which was later made public, Mr. Olivier sounded taken aback.

"My intentions were to run in this election, you know. You gotta admit, you probably have to give me a bit of time to figure this out," he said. "A question that's just running through my mind right now is: Is there an issue with me?"

"No, no, no, God no, that was never the issue," Mr. Lougheed reassured him.

"I'm still leaning towards probably running, Gerry, I'm not going to lie," Mr. Olivier said. "If you said right now I'd have had to make a decision before you walk out that door, Gerry, I'm going to run."

Mr. Lougheed told Mr. Olivier the Premier would speak with him directly. Think it over, he said.

"I think you need to hear everybody's voice, and then listen to your own voice."

Ms. Wynne called Mr. Olivier that night to request he drop his bid for the nomination. He turned her down. Mr. Olivier did not record that conversation, but later said she did not repeat Mr. Lougheed's offer of a job.

In the early evening of the next day, Mr. Olivier was at home when he got a call from Patricia Sorbara, Ms. Wynne's deputy chief of staff and the Liberal Party's campaign director. As he had with Mr. Lougheed, Mr. Olivier taped the conversation.

"I had a really good talk with my family and my team last night," Mr. Olivier told her confidently on the recording. "My position is still the same: I'm looking to seek that nomination."

Ms. Sorbara reminded Mr. Olivier what an extraordinary situation this was; no less than the Premier herself was asking him to step aside.

"This is a big, big step for her to make this ask. And for her to personally get on the phone with you in that way," Ms. Sorbara said. "She said, 'I'm not letting him go overnight without hearing from me because I know how massive this ask is.'"

"I liked having the conversation with the Premier," Mr. Olivier replied. "I've got more than ample and oodles of respect and hope to even aspire to be like her in the future."

But he was not backing down. So Ms. Sorbara tried another tack.

"Let's just think about, though, other ways that you could – and I'm not – I don't want – I was hesitant to go here because I don't want to look like I'm trying to suggest that there's a consolation prize," she said.

Ms. Sorbara laid out a menu of potential jobs or government appointments Mr. Olivier could receive. Among them were working as Mr. Thibeault's constituency assistant, taking a position on a government commission looking at disability issues or sitting on the Ontario Liberal Party executive.

"We should have the broader discussion about what is it that you'd be most interested in doing and then decide what shape that could take," she said. "Whether it's a full-time or a part-time job at a constituency office, whether it is appointments to boards or commissions, whether it is also going on the executive."

The pair parted on a cordial note.

"I'm around all weekend, just e-mail, text me, and I can call you any time," Ms. Sorbara said. "If you want to talk to the Premier again, we can arrange that too."

"No, I know she's real busy," Mr. Olivier laughed. "I completely understood her position."

After they hung up, he exhaled heavily.

"So what do I do?" Mr. Olivier asked a friend who was there.

"Well," she replied. "I think it's pretty clear that if you run, they're gonna bury you."

THE REVEAL

Mr. Olivier took the weekend to think it over, discussing with friends and praying for inspiration at church. By Monday, Dec. 15, he had made up his mind.

He called an 11 a.m. news conference for that day at the Plaza Hotel in Minnow Lake, just west of town. In a black sport coat and open-necked green shirt, surrounded by friends and family and reading from a statement, Mr. Olivier laid it all out.

Both Mr. Lougheed and Ms. Sorbara had offered him "a job or an appointment" in exchange for quitting the race, he said. Mr. Olivier invoked his quadriplegia, the result of an accident while playing hockey in his teens, to explain why he decided to speak out.

"Anyone who has a disability knows a major challenge is maintaining your self-dignity, self-respect, which is not easy when you depend on so many people on a daily basis. I have worked hard over 20 years since my injury to maintain a strong sense of dignity. And that will not change now," he said. "My message is clear. I will not be bullied, I will not be bought."

Three-hundred and forty kilometres to the south-east, Premier Kathleen Wynne was at the Marriot Eaton Centre Hotel in downtown Toronto for a luncheon speech to the Economic Club of Canada. But as she stood before the pre-holiday crowd of a few hundred Bay Street business people, talking about building infrastructure and strengthening public pensions, reporters at the back of the ballroom were glued to their phones.

Reports had begun trickling in about Mr. Olivier's allegations. By the time the Premier finished her speech, everyone wanted to ask her only one thing. Ms. Wynne and her aides hunkered down in a back room for 45 minutes before facing reporters.

When she emerged, the Premier flatly denied the accusations of bribery.

"What I did say and others in the team said to Andrew, is, 'We hope you stay involved,'" she said. "There were no specific offers of anything."

That day, Progressive Conservative MPP Steve Clark wrote to Ontario Provincial Police commissioner Vince Hawkes and asked him to open a criminal investigation. NDP MPP Gilles Bisson did the same with Elections Ontario.

One week into the New Year, Ms. Wynne called the by-election. She set the date for Feb. 5.

Mr. Olivier ran as an independent, directly challenging Mr. Thibeault. The NDP nominated Suzanne Shawbonquit. The polls showed a tight race, with all three in striking distance of a win. (The PCs, never much of a force in the blue-collar, union-supporting North, were far behind.)

For the New Democrats, the strategy was obvious. In one news conference, party leader Andrea Horwath used the word "cynical" to describe the Liberals no fewer than 18 times.

"The way that they have behaved is cynical to the maximum," she said. "Mr. Thibeault has joined in a cynical way, for what I believe are cynical reasons, a cynical team."

The NDP and the Liberals flooded the zone. Planeloads of staffers and MPPs relocated to Sudbury, trudging through knee-high snow banks in the biting cold to knock on doors for their candidates.

On Jan. 15, in the second week of the campaign, Mr. Olivier dropped another bombshell: He posted the recordings of his conversations with Ms. Sorbara and Mr. Lougheed online.

Mr. Olivier told The Globe and Mail at the time that he decided to come out with the tapes because people doubted his version of events.

"It was quite difficult to even campaign on openness and truthfulness and integrity when everyone in town here thought that I was crying wolf," he said. "The point ... was to let people know that I wasn't lying, that I was being truthful and honest."

The Liberals continued to deny wrongdoing.

Ms. Wynne started using a new defence: Since she had the power as party leader to cancel the nomination process and unilaterally appoint Mr. Thibeault as her candidate, any jobs Mr. Lougheed or Ms. Sorbara dangled in front of Mr. Olivier were not offered in exchange for dropping out.

"I had made a decision about appointing a candidate, which is within the purview of the leader of the Liberal Party," she said.

Her denials did nothing to turn down the temperature. The release of the recordings only heated up the by-election campaign, as they were played constantly on television and radio.

They also breathed life into a listless police investigation.

THE INVESTIGATION

As the political drama began in Sudbury, OPP investigators at the force's airy glass-and-brick headquarters in Orillia were trying to sort out whether anything criminal had happened. Detective-Sergeant Shawn Evans and Detective-Constable Erin Thomas of the anti-rackets branch were assigned to the case.

On Dec. 17, Det.-Constable Thomas pulled everything she could from the web on Mr. Olivier's press conference two days earlier. She spoke with Mr. Olivier by phone on Dec. 18, and arranged a meeting with him for Dec. 20, a Saturday, at noon at his office.

For the most part, Mr. Olivier was forthcoming, offering precise paraphrases of his conversations with Ms. Sorbara and Mr. Lougheed.

But he would not answer one question. When Det.-Constable Thomas asked if Mr. Olivier recorded any of the conversations, Mr. Olivier's lawyer, Claude Lacroix, interjected.

"No, we're not gonna answer that question just yet, 'kay," he said, according to a police transcript of the interview.

"Well, it's kind of important if there's a recording that verifies, you know, exactly – " Det.-Sergeant Evans explained.

"We're not gonna answer that question just yet," Mr. Lacroix repeated.

"Okay, so how do we handle that moving forward?"

"[You've] got the answer."

The next Monday, police decided there was not enough evidence to pursue a criminal investigation. The only thing left to do was send a copy of Mr. Olivier's statement to Elections Ontario officials, who were conducting a parallel probe into the allegations that the Elections Act was violated.

On Jan. 5, Det.-Constable Thomas spoke with Mr. Lacroix to get Mr. Olivier's consent to turn over his statement. During the conversation, Mr. Lacroix raised the topic of recordings that he had been so eager to shut down just two weeks before. He told police that, if they came to Mr. Olivier with a search warrant for any recordings that may or may not exist, Mr. Olivier would turn them over.

"Lacroix further noted that he would like to 'invite' the OPP to pursue this avenue regarding potential additional records," Det.-Constable Thomas later wrote in a court document.

On Jan. 9, Det.-Constable Thomas told Mr. Olivier over the phone that he had not provided enough information about any possible recordings for the police to obtain a search warrant. He could not, effectively, refuse to confirm if he had recordings but then expect the OPP to get a search warrant to obtain them.

Six days later, Mr. Olivier released the recordings publicly. When Det.-Constable Thomas first listened to them, she swiftly concluded the new information did not change anything.

"I ... noted no offers of specific positions were made during the conversations," she wrote.

But the next day, a Friday, OPP brass held a meeting on the case and decided not to close it so quickly. They sought a confidential legal opinion. That opinion came in on Saturday, and it made police reconsider.

On Monday morning, Det.-Sergeant Evans remembered something: The OPP had a similar situation just a few years earlier when they charged Larry O'Brien, then mayor of Ottawa, with corruption for offering a rival mayoral candidate help landing a federal a job in exchange for quitting the race. Mr. O'Brien was acquitted at trial, but the case might provide some insight into the parameters of the law.

Det.-Sergeant Evans e-mailed Det.-Sergeant Brian Mason, an OPP officer who had worked on the O'Brien case, at 9:17 a.m. asking if he had any relevant court decisions. At 10:50 a.m., Det.-Sergeant Mason sent him a five-page ruling from Justice Douglas Cunningham. The 2009 ruling rejected a motion from Mr. O'Brien's lawyers to have the case thrown out before trial on the grounds that the Criminal Code's anti-corruption provisions did not apply to the case. In that decision, Justice Cunningham spelled out in detail how to interpret Section 125 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits negotiating appointment to a government office in exchange for a "benefit," or bribe.

For Det.-Sergeant Evans and Det.-Constable Thomas, the ruling clarified two important aspects of the law.

First, that any negotiation over a government office in exchange for a benefit is a crime. In effect, Justice Cunningham ruled, it does not matter whether the appointment ever takes place or whether the person offering it even has the power to give the job. The sole fact they are negotiating over it by itself is illegal.

Second, Justice Cunningham's ruling stipulates that a bribe solicited in exchange for an office does not necessarily have to be something physical, such as money. It could be something more intangible. A political favour, for instance.

Det.-Sergeant Evans and Det.-Constable Thomas hunkered down to discuss it further. They split up the work, with Det.-Sergeant Evans reviewing the Sorbara conversation and Det.-Constable Thomas reviewing the Lougheed conversation. By the end of the day, both were convinced there were reasonable grounds to believe Ms. Sorbara and Mr. Lougheed had broken the law.

The next Monday, Jan. 26, Det.-Constable Thomas swore a 51-page information to obtain laying out the evidence in the case. A judge granted a production order. Officers collected the original recordings from Mr. Olivier later that week.

The Globe learned of the production order shortly after, and published a story about it. On the day of the by-election, The Globe obtained a copy of the ITO from the Barrie courthouse, posting a web story and tweeting details from the document that afternoon as the parties made a final push for votes.

Mr. Thibeault won comfortably, taking 41 per cent of the vote to Ms. Shawbonquit's 35 per cent. Mr. Olivier finished a distant third, at 12 per cent.

Hundreds of Liberals, mostly Toronto-based government staffers, crowded into the atrium of a Holiday Inn on the south side of Sudbury to watch the results, and danced into the small hours of the morning.

Around 11 p.m., Ms. Wynne and Mr. Thibeault arrived to the strains of Thunderstruck, pressed from all sides by the crowd.

"There was a lot of negativity in this campaign," Ms. Wynne told the cheering faithful, "and you saw through that."

THE SCANDAL RAGES ON

Liberal euphoria over Mr. Thibeault's victory was short-lived.

When the legislature resumed on Tuesday, Feb. 17, the opposition mounted a non-stop barrage in Question Period, demanding Mr. Lougheed be dropped from the police board and Ms. Sorbara step aside from her duties as deputy chief of staff.

"There is a culture of arrogance and entitlement in the Premier's office, and the Premier is refusing to clean it up. This does not pass the smell test," Ms. Horwath thundered.

Mr. Thibeault himself got a rough ride. On the first day of his new job, New Democrat MPPs repeatedly bellowed at him from across the aisle: "Traitor!"

Even interim Progressive Conservative leader Jim Wilson got in on it.

"May I just begin by congratulating the new member for Sudbury, Mr. Thibeault? Welcome to the House. Where is he?" he asked as he looked towards the NDP benches, then feigned surprise as he noticed Mr. Thibeault sitting with the Liberals. "Oh, you're over there! I can't see that far, Glenn."

Mr. Thibeault tried to shrug it off.

"You know what? A win is a win is a win," he told reporters as he left the chamber.

On Thursday, Feb. 19, Chief Electoral Officer Greg Essensa delivered his ruling: Ms. Sorbara and Mr. Lougheed had broken the Elections Act.

"Having reviewed the evidence and findings from this regulatory investigation, it is my opinion that the actions of Gerry Lougheed Jr. and Patricia Sorbara constitute an 'apparent contravention' of … the Elections Act," he wrote. He called his finding "unprecedented."

Elections Ontario has no power to lay charges, so it referred the matter to the OPP.

The next day, Ms. Wynne decided to fight fire with fire. When she arrived at work that morning, she called a news conference for 12:30 p.m. in the government caucus room at Queen's Park.

The Premier accused several PC and NDP MPPs – whom she refused to name – of secretly asking the Liberals for government jobs and appointments in exchange for resigning their seats.

"Members of both opposition parties have approached members of my team on a number of occasions suggesting they would vacate their seats if we could guarantee an appointment. We refused each time," she said. Then, she warned the opposition to ease up in its attacks.

If Ms. Wynne had believed her veiled threat would shut the opposition up, she miscalculated. The PCs and NDP used virtually every question in Question Period for the next six weeks to grill the government over the scandal.

For Mr. Lougheed and Ms. Sorbara, meanwhile, life seemed to go on as usual.

The Sudbury police board voted to keep Mr. Lougheed as chair because the accusations were not related to his work for the board.

And Ms. Sorbara was still spotted regularly around Queen's Park, attending Question Period and working out of the Premier's office.

At the Liberals' Heritage Dinner on March 11 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the party's largest annual fundraiser, Ms. Sorbara even tweeted a photo of herself with Mr. Thibeault.

"Happy to introduce @GlennThibeault to folks at @OntLiberal Heritage Dinner 2015," she wrote. "Hanging with friends, raising money."

THE CHARGES

Prosecutors agonized for months over whether to advise police to go ahead with charges. In the end, they split the difference: Charges against Mr. Lougheed, but not Ms. Sorbara.

On the morning of Thursday, Sept. 24, police served Mr. Lougheed a summons. He would face one count of unlawfully influencing or negotiating an appointment and one count of counselling an offence not committed, for allegedly encouraging Mr. Olivier to seek a benefit in exchange for quitting the by-election race.

"I will be vigorously defending these charges in the courts," he vowed in a statement. He stepped down as chair of the Sudbury police board and as chancellor of Huntington University.

The charges, Mr. Lougheed's defence team said, have been "very stressful" for him and left a "cloud of suspicion hanging over his head."

Mr. Lacy, Mr. Lougheed's lawyer, said he made an unusual move in requesting a judicial pre-trial on Dec. 1 to start setting dates for the rest of the proceedings.

"We could have asked for a month or two or longer to review all the disclosure. We could have insisted that the Crown provide us with all of the disclosure – we're still waiting for some," said Mr. Lacy, a barrister with the defence firm Greenspan LLP. "But instead, based on what we have now and what we've known in terms of what's been made public, we want to get this matter moving quickly."

Ms. Wynne has refused to say whether she or others in her office asked Mr. Lougheed to discuss jobs with Mr. Olivier on their behalf.

On the day Mr. Lougheed was charged, at an impromptu news conference at the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto, where she had been speaking at an Eid celebration, the Premier ducked questions on her own involvement in the matter.

"It is now for the court system to ask those questions, to deal with the situation," she said. "Of course it's upsetting."

Whatever the outcome, it will certainly rank as one of the province's most unusual political scandals, given the seriousness of the accusations and the unimportance of the politics. A Liberal operative faces possible jail time, and a Premier is politically wounded – all over a by-election that would not have changed the balance of power in the legislature.

Asked if the imbroglio will damage the Liberals, Ms. Wynne demurred.

"That will be for the people of Ontario to decide."

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