Mediaboss Marketing

Allison Jones, The Canadian Press Published Thursday, February 19, 2015 10:47AM EST Last Updated Thursday, February 19, 2015 4:19PM EST

TORONTO -- Two Ontario Liberals, including the premier's deputy chief of staff, appear to have contravened a bribery section of the Election Act, the province's electoral officer said Thursday in an "unprecedented" finding.

An Elections Ontario investigation found there is evidence that Premier Kathleen Wynne's deputy chief of staff, Pat Sorbara, and a local Liberal organizer offered a would-be candidate a job or appointment to get him to step aside in a recent byelection in Sudbury.

For weeks the premier has refused opposition calls to remove Sorbara from her role while under investigation and the government has said it is unable to step in to remove Gerry Lougheed as chair of the city's police services board.

The demands grew louder Thursday after Elections Ontario's conclusions were tabled in the legislature just minutes before question period, apparently catching the premier off guard.

"We all just got this information," Wynne said more than half a dozen times. "We are taking it under advisement...What I will not do is take rash advice from the other side of the floor until I've had an opportunity to consider all of the information."

The Liberals were quick to point out that Elections Ontario did not implicate Wynne herself nor Glenn Thibeault, the former NDP MP who won the Feb. 5 byelection for the Liberals.

Greg Essensa, the chief electoral officer of Ontario, concluded that Sorbara and Lougheed's actions "constitute an apparent contravention" of a section of the Election Act concerning "bribery in connection with inducing a person to become, refrain from becoming, or withdrawing from being a candidate."

Essensa called the circumstances "unprecedented."

"No chief electoral officer of Ontario has ever conducted a regulatory investigation into allegations of bribery or ever reported an apparent contravention of the Election Act or the Election Finances Act to the Ministry of the Attorney General," he said in his statement.

More here:
Ontario Liberals apparently contravened Election Act