Brown turns to capital ties for comeback

Patrick Brown’s comeback campaign to lead Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party is being run from a house in Greenboro.

The Ottawa address is listed on the announcement for Brown’s first rally as he seeks to take back the leadership he quit in January.

The home, on a side street near Conroy and Hunt Club roads, belongs to Brian Storseth, a former Conservative MP for Westlock- St. Paul, a riding just north of Edmonton.

“As the campaign was put together quickly, my house was used as the original campaign office. That will be amended in the next 48 hours to the Toronto office,” Storseth said in a brief email exchange Monday. He’s managing Brown’s campaign, he said.

The fact that Brown’s campaign is formally starting in Ottawa speaks to Brown’s political bedrock, exposed now that allegations of sexual misdeeds have scoured away much of the rest of his institutional support: his contacts and supporters in federal politics.

Like Brown, Storseth is about 40, was first elected in 2006 and spent nine years on the backbenches. Like Brown, he has a penchant for hockey-based charity fundraisers. Like Brown, Storseth quit federal politics in 2015 and made a bid to enter provincial politics. Unlike Brown, Storseth lost as he sought a Progressive Conservative nomination at home in Alberta.

Storseth is now chairman of Reliq Health, a company that makes telemedicine technology for doctors to see and monitor patients in remote communities. He co-chaired Maxime Bernier’s second-place campaign to lead the federal Tories and he’s a vocal supporter of Brown’s career in provincial politics here.

As it happens, Brian Storseth’s wife, Amel, works as an assistant to Brown’s successor and friend Alex Nuttall, the current Barrie Conservative MP who called a news conference at the end of January to denounce Brown’s downfall as an inside job by Toronto elites. Nuttall is “one of our federal endorsements,” Storseth said.

The first person to speak up directly on Brown’s behalf — not just in his defence, but directly for him — after he resigned was Alise Mills, a crisis-communications expert. She’s based in Vancouver but did a short stint in Ottawa as the head of Conservative Voice, a non-profit formed to push for fiscal conservatism and small government (its website doesn’t seem to have been updated since Mills left in about 2016, though it has a Facebook page).

Brown ran for the provincial Tory leadership as an outsider come to shake things up. After he defeated establishment candidate Christine Elliott, he imported experienced pros from Stephen Harper’s party and government to join his staff as leader of the opposition at Queen’s Park, to run the Progressive Conservative party and to plan the upcoming election campaign. Other former MPs flocked to Brown’s side as provincial candidates.

Brown’s own backroomers kicked the struts out from under him when the allegations of sexual misdeeds first aired, quitting en masse while Brown gave his news conference denying everything — when they left him, they seemed to take the promise of victory in June with them. The ex-MPs have mostly moved over to Caroline Mulroney’s camp; that was before Brown’s surprise entry in the leadership race Friday, but there’s been no mass defection back to Brown’s side.

His prominent backers now mostly fall into two groups: federal-politics allies such as Storseth and people he recruited to the provincial party after becoming leader. As he kicked off his campaign in Mississauga on Sunday, he had one veteran MPP with him in Toby Barrett of Haldimand-Norfolk, The others on stage with him were family, rookie MPP Ross Romano of Sault Ste. Marie; and a passel of yet-unelected candidates, including Carleton’s Goldie Ghamari.

(Ottawa-Vanier’s Fadi Nemr backs Brown, too, as does Ottawa South candidate Karin Howard. Orléans candidate Cameron Montgomery is with Elliott. Kanata-Carleton’s Merrilee Fullerton supports Mulroney. Sitting Nepean-Carleton MPP Lisa MacLeod is staying neutral and Ottawa Centre and Ottawa West-Nepean don’t currently have Progressive Conservative candidates.)

Brown’s backers are effectively lined up against interim leader Vic Fedeli and Lanark MPP Randy Hillier. Fedeli, who until Friday I’d have said was universally respected by Ontario Tories, talks about the party having rotted under Brown’s leadership and kicked him out of the caucus.

Hillier, the former maverick populist who’s adapted to life on a team in his 10 years in politics, has been a human flame-thrower pointed at Brown for a week now, accusing him of flat-out fraud in his administration of the party.

If Brown should win his way back, it’ll be awfully hard for them to stick around under his renewed leadership. But Brown didn’t need their support when he won last time, and with a seemingly bottomless well of federal-politics friends to draw on, maybe he won’t need it this time, either.

The fact that Brown’s campaign is formally starting in Ottawa speaks to Brown’s political bedrock ... his contacts and supporters in federal politics.