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The acquittal of a second-tier aide to current Premier Kathleen Wynne will probably hurt the Ontario Liberals a lot more than the criminal conviction of her predecessor’s chief of staff.
The news came in one-two punches at the end of last week. Thursday night, Patricia Sorbara left the Liberal campaign team she once headed, just about five months before the next election. It was also four months after a judge dismissed charges she and local party powerbroker Gerry Lougheed tried to bribe a Liberal candidate out of a byelection in Sudbury.
Sorbara is the type to stay out of the spotlight but she’s credited with imposing discipline on a party organization that really needed it, reeling after falling to minority status then losing byelection after byelection. She’s, to put it generously, not a pushover. In government, Wynne made Sorbara a deputy chief of staff in her office.
The official explanation for putting her off the campaign is that while Sorbara was awaiting her eventual acquittal, the party just kind of moved on without her.
Pat Sorbara at the Election Act bribery trial in Sudbury, Ont., Sept. 7, 2017.
“The team that stepped up while Pat was forced to deal with completely unfounded charges in Sudbury came together and gelled in the last several months,” Wynne said in a written statement. “This is the team that will take us into the coming election.”
“Issues re-integrating into the existing team proved too tough to overcome,” Sorbara tweeted, backing Wynne’s account. The party leader is the top boss and she gets her way. “The Leader made the decision she felt best and I am no longer part of the campaign.”
(THREAD). Two things I know for sure about politics: 1) it is not for the faint of heart and 2) if you work as political staff, you serve at the pleasure of the Leader. 1/5 #onpoli
— Patricia Sorbara (@psorbara99) January 20, 2018
They must be really, really tight to not make room for Sorbara, who marshalled the party to its unlikely win in 2014, and is one of the leader’s close friends. Wynne stuck by her long after it was politically convenient to do so, right up until Sorbara faced Election Act charges, and said more than once that she looked forward to Sorbara’s return after the Sudbury nonsense was sorted out.
Then, Friday morning in Toronto, Judge Timothy Lipson convicted Dalton McGuinty’s former right-hand man, David Livingston, of attempted mischief to data and unauthorized use of a computer system, for trying to wipe hard drives in the premier’s office on his way out the door in early 2013. Livingston still faces sentencing.
His legal drama preoccupied the Ontario legislature for years, as opposition parties probed just what Livingston and his deputy Laura Miller did to, as it was alleged, try to get rid of damaging emails that showed that cancelling a pair of unpopular gas-fired electricity plants before the 2011 election would cost a lot more than the government let on at the time. Miller was acquitted, the judge having determined that her knowledge of what was going on wasn’t provably deep enough to justify a conviction; Livingston, as McGuinty’s chief of staff and Miller’s boss, was found culpable.
Deeming Livingston, the man who ran the premier’s office, a criminal is a big, big deal, the more so when his criminality directly involved his work. The Progressive Conservative line was that they were deeply sad for Ontario. So (POP!) very (FIZZ!) sad (GLUG!).
It’s a sad day when a Premier’s most senior official is found guilty of trying to orchestrate a cover-up of the $1.1 billion gas plant scandal. #gasplants #onpoli pic.twitter.com/RC0cq3Hkly
— Patrick Brown (@brownbarrie) January 19, 2018
Both courtroom battles were mostly over whether each person’s conduct was against the law, not really over what they did. Sorbara and Lougheed tried to dispose of an inconvenient local candidate in Sudbury and offered him other work; Miller and Livingston were (at best) incredibly cavalier with public records damaging to their party and boss. That wasn’t disputed — only whether doing so counted as fraud, or bribery, or breach of a public trust.
In Sorbara’s, Lougheed’s and Miller’s cases, judges said what they did wasn’t illegal. But “not technically illegal” is not the standard of behaviour we expect of people with public power. A criminal conviction for a premier’s top aide is obviously very bad, but all the other acquittals don’t mean nothing objectionable happened. We’re entitled to be repelled by acts that don’t send people to jail. For the same reason, though, Livingston’s conviction probably won’t make a ton of difference to the next six months, any more than Miller’s acquittal will.
We already knew what they had been accused of doing, thanks to the detailed allegations the police spelled out in investigative documents before charges were even laid. We were already treating it as a scandal disqualifying the Liberals from holding office until they all go and sit in a corner for a long while. Or we’d already shrugged it off as wrongdoing that belonged to a previous premier’s office — gross, but just gum-on-your-shoe gross, not dead-raccoon-in-the-swimming-pool gross. Either way, Livingston and Miller were out of politics here and not likely coming back.
Sorbara was the general who’d already won a war for her party but this time her own army passed by without her. That’s a bigger win for the opposition than the one that got much more attention.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The news came in one-two punches at the end of last week. Thursday night, Patricia Sorbara left the Liberal campaign team she once headed, just about five months before the next election. It was also four months after a judge dismissed charges she and local party powerbroker Gerry Lougheed tried to bribe a Liberal candidate out of a byelection in Sudbury.
Sorbara is the type to stay out of the spotlight but she’s credited with imposing discipline on a party organization that really needed it, reeling after falling to minority status then losing byelection after byelection. She’s, to put it generously, not a pushover. In government, Wynne made Sorbara a deputy chief of staff in her office.
The official explanation for putting her off the campaign is that while Sorbara was awaiting her eventual acquittal, the party just kind of moved on without her.
Pat Sorbara at the Election Act bribery trial in Sudbury, Ont., Sept. 7, 2017.
“The team that stepped up while Pat was forced to deal with completely unfounded charges in Sudbury came together and gelled in the last several months,” Wynne said in a written statement. “This is the team that will take us into the coming election.”
“Issues re-integrating into the existing team proved too tough to overcome,” Sorbara tweeted, backing Wynne’s account. The party leader is the top boss and she gets her way. “The Leader made the decision she felt best and I am no longer part of the campaign.”
(THREAD). Two things I know for sure about politics: 1) it is not for the faint of heart and 2) if you work as political staff, you serve at the pleasure of the Leader. 1/5 #onpoli
— Patricia Sorbara (@psorbara99) January 20, 2018
They must be really, really tight to not make room for Sorbara, who marshalled the party to its unlikely win in 2014, and is one of the leader’s close friends. Wynne stuck by her long after it was politically convenient to do so, right up until Sorbara faced Election Act charges, and said more than once that she looked forward to Sorbara’s return after the Sudbury nonsense was sorted out.
Then, Friday morning in Toronto, Judge Timothy Lipson convicted Dalton McGuinty’s former right-hand man, David Livingston, of attempted mischief to data and unauthorized use of a computer system, for trying to wipe hard drives in the premier’s office on his way out the door in early 2013. Livingston still faces sentencing.
His legal drama preoccupied the Ontario legislature for years, as opposition parties probed just what Livingston and his deputy Laura Miller did to, as it was alleged, try to get rid of damaging emails that showed that cancelling a pair of unpopular gas-fired electricity plants before the 2011 election would cost a lot more than the government let on at the time. Miller was acquitted, the judge having determined that her knowledge of what was going on wasn’t provably deep enough to justify a conviction; Livingston, as McGuinty’s chief of staff and Miller’s boss, was found culpable.
Deeming Livingston, the man who ran the premier’s office, a criminal is a big, big deal, the more so when his criminality directly involved his work. The Progressive Conservative line was that they were deeply sad for Ontario. So (POP!) very (FIZZ!) sad (GLUG!).
It’s a sad day when a Premier’s most senior official is found guilty of trying to orchestrate a cover-up of the $1.1 billion gas plant scandal. #gasplants #onpoli pic.twitter.com/RC0cq3Hkly
— Patrick Brown (@brownbarrie) January 19, 2018
Both courtroom battles were mostly over whether each person’s conduct was against the law, not really over what they did. Sorbara and Lougheed tried to dispose of an inconvenient local candidate in Sudbury and offered him other work; Miller and Livingston were (at best) incredibly cavalier with public records damaging to their party and boss. That wasn’t disputed — only whether doing so counted as fraud, or bribery, or breach of a public trust.
In Sorbara’s, Lougheed’s and Miller’s cases, judges said what they did wasn’t illegal. But “not technically illegal” is not the standard of behaviour we expect of people with public power. A criminal conviction for a premier’s top aide is obviously very bad, but all the other acquittals don’t mean nothing objectionable happened. We’re entitled to be repelled by acts that don’t send people to jail. For the same reason, though, Livingston’s conviction probably won’t make a ton of difference to the next six months, any more than Miller’s acquittal will.
We already knew what they had been accused of doing, thanks to the detailed allegations the police spelled out in investigative documents before charges were even laid. We were already treating it as a scandal disqualifying the Liberals from holding office until they all go and sit in a corner for a long while. Or we’d already shrugged it off as wrongdoing that belonged to a previous premier’s office — gross, but just gum-on-your-shoe gross, not dead-raccoon-in-the-swimming-pool gross. Either way, Livingston and Miller were out of politics here and not likely coming back.
Sorbara was the general who’d already won a war for her party but this time her own army passed by without her. That’s a bigger win for the opposition than the one that got much more attention.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
