TRYING TO SUCCEED HIMSELF
But at what cost to his party?
Former Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown is running to succeed himself, registering on the same day as his temporary successor kicked him out of the party caucus at Queen’s Park.
“Shortly after becoming interim leader, I asked Patrick Brown to step aside from the PC caucus,” interim leader Vic Fedeli said in a brisk statement Friday morning. “The legislature is set to resume sitting on Tuesday, Feb. 20, following Family Day. Earlier today, Mr. Brown was notified that he has been removed from the PC caucus effective immediately.”
The opposition party wants to move on from allegations of sexual misconduct levied against its ex-leader, which were aired on CTV News. Brown allegedly propositioned a teenager for oral sex by exposing himself and aggressively pressed himself on a drunk staffer after an event she organized, all in the late 2000s. Four leadership candidates debated Thursday and agreed the Tories badly need party unity ahead of the provincial election due in June.
NOPE.
Friday afternoon, just before the cutoff to enter, Brown was at party headquarters in Toronto with the paperwork to make himself the fifth candidate in the race. Ejecting Brown from caucus at Queen’s Park doesn’t cancel his party membership. That, 100 signatures from fellow members, and a $125,000 entry fee is what it takes to run.
Gathering those wouldn’t have been difficult. Brown is a prodigious fundraiser and a meaningful percentage of Tories believe he’s been betrayed, including many of the party’s nominated candidates and Haldimand-Norfolk MPP Toby Barrett. Barrett accompanied Brown to HQ for the filing.
Fellow candidates Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney quickly criticized Brown for running to get back his old job.
The party is “objectively stronger without Patrick Brown,” Ford said in a tweet, and the ex-leader was an obstacle to defeating the Liberals in June.
“As I’ve said before, Patrick Brown made the right decision to step down. A leadership election is not the place for him to try to clear his name,” Mulroney said.
Via her son and aide Galen Flaherty, candidate Christine Elliott said simply that the party needs an experienced leader to face the Liberals and Kathleen Wynne.
So now while the Tori es try to pick a new leader and direction, as they have to, they also get to discuss the justice of Patrick Brown’s departure and his defence, again and again, with new tidbits every day. He didn’t know most of his top lieutenants were quitting on him as he gave his defiant news conference; he never technically agreed to resign; he was set up by “political adversaries” (possibly Liber- als, possibly traitor Tories); he’s taken a lie-detector test; he’s only beginning to fight back. Brown dared his accusers to call the Barrie police, if they feel so strongly about it.
Non-criminality isn’t the standard for our politicians, which I can’t believe needs saying about once a week now.
If Brown, aged about 30, was trying to pick up teenagers in bars and/or having drunk staffers in his bedroom, he has terrible judgment. Yes, our standards have changed, mostly thanks to the women who started telling their stories about Donald Trump and then Harvey Weinstein and then more and more gross characters, but this wasn’t the Middle Ages: it was around 2008 and Brown was a member of Parliament .“She was legal !” works in court, not on a campaign sign.
Brown’s defenders call this behaviour no big deal, stuff practically every heterosexual adult male has done, like Trump’s line that bragging about all his assaults and philandering was just ordinary locker-room talk. In what locker rooms? Who are you people hanging out with? Stop slandering heterosexual adult males.
Regardless, look at the burning dump Brown left behind in the leader’s office. His interim successor Vic Fedeli almost immediately revealed that despite Brown’s boasts just a couple of weeks earlier that the Tories had 200,000 paid-up members, the actual number was 133,000 and they weren’t done investigating. Scraping out the rot would occupy him full-time, Fedeli said, abandoning his plan to seek the party leadership permanently.
Brown’s friend, party president Rick Dykstra, resigned hours ahead of a sexual-misconduct scandal of his own.
The party overturned two of its own local nominations, including in Ottawa West-Nepean, and a third candidate asked for his own to be vacated. Too much cheating, or plausible allegations thereof, for them to stand. Brown had intervened personally to preserve them.
Sitting members of the Progressive Conservative caucus have stomped on Brown, none more vocally than Lanark MPP Randy Hillier, who’s used Twitter to accuse Brown of “fraudulent and fake memberships, rigging nominations, PC party paying his condo rent, financial improprieties and using PC party funds as a personal ATM.” All four contestants for the party leadership have repudiated Brown’s bravest political stance, in favour of taxing carbon emissions, ripping the guts out of Brown’s hand-crafted election platform.
It’s an impossible dilemma: Brown is absolutely entitled to defend himself, even to want his leadership spot back, but every minute he spends fighting, he harms his party. Even if we imagine that Brown’s female accusers are lying and he can be vindicated of everything, there’s no repairing the damage the sex accusations exposed. If Brown is reinstalled as leader, he’ll be king of a ruin.