Sordid saga renews doubt of PM’s judgment

Last summer, as riding boundaries across Canada were being redrawn, Mississauga-Brampton South Conservative MP Eve Adams decided to move to Oakville to run in the new riding of Oakville NorthBurlington.

Adams, a former Mississauga councillor, narrowly beat Liberal MP Navdeep Bains to win her seat in 2011. Across Ontario, Liberals won 25 per cent of the popular vote in that election, worse than their result in the Tory sweeps of 1958 (32) or 1984 (30).

This sure looks to have been the high-water mark for the Tories in Ontario, the fourth election in a row where they took territory from the Liberals, moving in from the white countryside to the multi-hued suburbs.

Now that the tide is turning, Adams wanted to move to the safer seat, to avoid losing to Bains. The only problem: The party has promised open nomination battles, and Oakville chiropractor Natalia Lishchyna wanted to run, with the help of veteran Tory organizer John Mykytyshyn.

In Adams’s corner: Her fiancé, Dimitri Soudas, former director of communications to Stephen Harper, was then working for the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Both Lishchyna and Adams had checked with top Tory Jenni Byrne, and were told they could seek the nomination.

In October, as Oakville Conservatives prepared for the founding meeting of the new riding association, Soudas asked regional organizer Wally Butts to let Adams speak at the meeting.

Butts, 70, an avid hunter and fisherman from the woods north of Port Dover, isn’t talking to reporters, but local Tories say he came to politics in opposition to the gun registry, and actually personally convinced (the late senator) Doug Finley to join the Reform Party.

Butts, who has been a paid party organizer for 10 years, didn’t think it would be fair for Adams to speak at the meeting. He butted heads with Soudas and eventually national councillor Mark Dotzert sided with Butts.

At the meeting, on Nov. 13, 2013, about 100 Tories gathered at a Ukrainian cultural centre in Oakville to elect the board. Lishchyna’s supporters outnumbered Adams’s people and they took control.

Soudas’s resume is long on (very) aggressively spinning reporters and short on organizational work, and he was out-hustled in Oakville.

Soon after, though, Harper hired him as executive director of the party, in charge of organizing across Canada. Soudas had to sign a commitment to stay out of his fiancée’s nomination fight. He didn’t.

Members of the riding association started to receive mail from Adams, including brochures with endorsements from cabinet ministers (who later declined to say whether they had actually authorized the endorsements).

This set off alarm bells. Where did she get the riding association members’ information? It looks like she took their addresses from the party’s sophisticated voter information database, CIMS, which would give her an edge over Lishchyna. Lishchyna’s people think she got access from Soudas.

On Jan. 28, the board wrote to Adams to complain, telling her that members were “upset that their personal information was accessed and used in a manner they never consented to. They are deeply concerned about how secure the Conservative Party maintains the personal information of its members.”

On Feb. 22, Adams wrote back: “You indicate individuals are ‘upset’ and ‘deeply concerned.’ No one has expressed such concern to me. Please feel free to ask individuals to contact me directly or let me know who has expressed interest in this matter.”

Adams decided to crash a March 19 meeting of the riding association board. Soudas waited in the hallway. Board members asked her to leave. She refused. The meeting broke up.

Butts wrote to the party the next day: “When this situation originally arose, it was made clear to me that Dimitri would not be involved, and Eve was to be treated just like any other candidate seeking nomination as a candidate. I am in a totally untenable position in this matter as Dimitri is my ultimate boss. Can you please take action in this matter to straighten out this worsening mess?”

The day after Butts sent that email, Soudas asked Butts to drive two hours to Oakville for a very short meeting at a Starbucks, where he fired him.

Alarm bells were ringing at headquarters, however, and party lawyers Arthur Hamilton and Guy Giorno were asked to find out what Soudas was doing. They found that he had been violating his commitment to stay out of the nomination fight, and he resigned.

Now he can focus full-time on selling party memberships for Adams. To win, he’ll need to out-hustle Mykytyshyn this time. It’s a make or break situation. Unlike Lishchyna, Adams isn’t from Oakville, and local Tories may not like what they have learned about her recently.

The whole sordid saga raises familiar questions about the prime minister’s judgment. Soudas has been a doggedly loyal, sharp-elbowed operator at the highest level for almost a decade, rising through the ranks because he enjoyed Harper’s confidence.

Now that he has trashed his career, leaving smoking carnage behind him at party headquarters, you have to wonder what Harper was thinking.