National Post (National Edition)
That’s special: Wynne, witness for the prosecution
Liberal henchpersons face bribery trial
On Tuesday, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced she will forswear parliamentary privilege and agree to testify in the upcoming bribery trial of Liberal henchpersons Pat Sorbara, formerly her deputy chief of staff, and Gerry Lougheed, a party activist. They stand accused of offering would-be Sudbury byelection candidate Andrew Olivier certain incentives, shall we say, to make way for Glenn Thibeault, who is now the province’s energy minister.
It would have taken some chutzpah for Wynne to do otherwise. There is no guarantee privilege would have kept her out of the witness stand, and the attempt would have looked absolutely dreadful. But she might have been tempted. The alternative is little better. Let’s revisit some pertinent chunks of Olivier’s conversations with Sorbara and Lougheed, which he helpfully recorded and released.
Lougheed to Olivier: “The premier wants to talk to you. We would like to present to you options in terms of appointments, jobs, whatever.”
Sorbara: “We should have the broader discussion about what is it that you’d be most interested in doing … whether it’s a full-time or a parttime job at a constituency office, whether it is appointments to boards or commissions …”
The Liberal defence: It could not have been an effort to encourage Olivier to “refrain from becoming a candidate or withdraw his … candidacy” — as proscribed by Section 96.1(e) of the Ontario Elections Act, under which Lougheed and Sorbara are charged — because “Olivier had already been informed that he would not be the candidate.”
So it wasn’t a bribe, then. Rather, as Sorbara gingerly suggested to Olivier, it was a “consolation prize.”
And yet, here’s Sorbara again: “You’re being asked to do a favour, I guess, to make the sacrifice, this time, and that … can go a long way in terms of opening up options.”
Generally one asks for a favour before it’s received, no? But perhaps it was unrelated. Perhaps Sorbara simply wanted to line up a partner for porketta bingo for her next trip to nickel country.
Wynne isn’t on any tapes, needless to say. It takes no effort to imagine she knew nothing, and would want to know nothing, about all this greasy business. But the premier on the witness stand is going to drive home an already unmissable point. For the better part of four years, since taking office, Wynne has systematically laid waste to her breath-of-fresh-air, doing-politics-differently image. That’s not special; that’s just a politician revealing her public image to be a sham. (Get in line, ma’am!) A bribery trial, though, albeit a non-criminal one? That’s special.
You still hear people of all political stripes, and of none, scoff at the very idea of these proceedings. Surely everyone knows that offering public-payroll positions for partisan favours is just how Canadian party politics works!
The nub of that argument is that politics is inherently disreputable, but because it’s politics, disreputability isn’t quite as disreputable. Bribery isn’t quite the same thing. Lying shamelessly isn’t quite the same thing. Screwing people over, putting your thumb on the scale, appropriating public funds for personal gain, generally behaving like a lesser ape — all are clearly unacceptable in every field from waste management and construction to banking, retail and food service. But the field of running the country is just inherently, necessarily different.
Perhaps it is. It does not follow that we have to respect the people involved who are behaving disreputably. Millions were appalled on Monday by President Donald Trump’s entirely inappropriate speech to a massive crowd of Boy Scouts. But his appearance was just an extreme manifestation of many Western societies’ outsized tolerance of appalling behaviour from their politicians. If you saw people on the sidewalk behaving the way MPs and MPPs do in question period, you would cross the street to avoid them. You certainly wouldn’t send your kids on a field trip to see them bark, moo and throw rhetorical feces at each other.
Wynne probably doesn’t deserve to represent everything that’s wrong with Canadian politics. I could pick 25 better candidates just off the top of my head. But when she arrives in Sudbury to help the court decide whether Sorbara’s and Lougheed’s behaviour was illegal, or just unarguably unethical, that crown won’t look bad on her head. Should Sorbara be exonerated, Wynne has said she’ll welcome her back into the fold with open arms — thus officially establishing “totally skeevy” as the standard of behaviour she expects from her operatives.