Conservatively speaking, it was a crazy kind of day
Lanark MPP accuses former leader of ethics lapse as rivals threaten revolt
When the Ontario legislature resumed sitting Tuesday, Patrick Brown’s seat in a distant corner sat empty while the former Tory leader was telling supporters via social media to expect more allegations from forces “bigger and more powerful than a select group of individuals who feel entitled to destroy what we’ve built together these past three years.”
Then he made his case to be allowed to join the race for the Tory leadership, even as new allegations were being made against him by Conservative Randy Hillier, as David Reevely writes. Elsewhere, federal party stalwart Cheryl Gallant was bracing for her first nomination challenge,
Kelly Egan explains, since winning the Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke seat 18 years ago.
Ottawa Valley MPP Randy Hillier intensified his campaign against former Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown on Tuesday, reporting him to the provincial integrity commissioner for alleged ethics violations — just after most of the Tory party’s executive threatened to revolt if Brown isn’t allowed to run to reclaim his place at the top of the party.
The integrity complaint, which Hillier released publicly at the end of the day, alleges that Brown accepted trips abroad from suppliers to the party and failed to report outside income in routine disclosures to the legislature, and asks questions about how he’s able to afford his home near Barrie.
The trips included visits to India, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Fiji, and Abu Dhabi, Hillier’s complaint says, where expenses were, it alleges, covered by Laj Prasher (who owns a telephony company) or Robert Faissal (a business consultant and greenenergy entrepreneur), or their business associates. The trips to the Middle East appear to have included visits to refugee camps.
Faissal, a public fan of Brown, quickly threatened to sue Hillier for defamation, calling his claims “grossly inaccurate” and part of a “political smear campaign.”
Other MPPs accompanied Brown on one of the trips to India and tweeted about it extensively in 2016. One of them was Lisa MacLeod, the Tory MPP for Nepean-Carleton, who said at the time she paid for the voyage out of her own pocket.
“My husband sacrificed to send me so I could build a relationship with Patrick. We felt it was important,” she said Tuesday.
Hillier said once Vic Fedeli got into the Tory leader’s office they were able to discern that neither the party nor Brown’s legislature budget covered the costs.
Brown was often accompanied by a party intern with whom he was having a relationship, Hillier alleges, and included socialmedia posts from her indicating she was in many of those places at the same time as Brown was.
In a different vein, Hillier’s complaint cites media reports that Brown rented out his Barriearea home, and notes he didn’t disclose any income from doing so. It also asks how Brown could cover payments on a $1.7-million mortgage on the property, even on his salary of about $180,000 as an MPP and party leader.
(For this, Hillier uses an online mortgage-payment calculator to estimate Brown’s payments at about $8,100 a month, though the calculation relies heavily on assumptions about Brown’s interest rate and payment schedule.)
Brown didn’t immediately have a response to the claims. Allegations such as Hillier’s are meant to trigger an investigation by integrity commissioner J. David Wake, a former judge. The allegations have not been tested in any formal proceeding or way at this point.
“On the weekend, I put out a statement in which I declared Mr. Brown to be unfit to be leader, unfit to be in the PC caucus, and unfit to be premier,” Hillier said in a fresh declaration against his former leader and caucusmate. “This statement was incomplete. He is also unfit to serve in the legislature.”
Brown has said he deserves “due process” in defending against sexual-misconduct allegations first aired on CTV News that led quickly to his resignation in January. That’s what he should have, by answering these complaints formally, Hillier said.
Hillier, the Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington MPP, has been a major Tory faction’s attack dog against Brown, who needs approval from a party committee to enter the race to succeed himself as leader. One qualification to run is to be eligible to run as a candidate for a seat in the legislature in the next election; Brown is officially the party’s nominee in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte. But Fedeli kicked Brown out of the Progressive Conservative caucus last Friday and now the party’s nominations committee could take the riding nomination away.
Brown met for an interview with the committee Tuesday evening. These internal deliberations aren’t public and have no required timelines.
The committee nixes candidacies all the time — the frequency with which it did so when Brown was leader ticked off would-be candidates all over the province. It’s vacated two nominations since Brown resigned, over ballot-stuffing allegations that Brown himself didn’t consider serious.
Not so fast, say Brown loyalists in the party. Ten of them, including several of the Progressive Conservative party’s numerous vice-presidents and the president of the party youth wing, wrote to the nominations committee to “demand that the (committee) not disallow the candidacy of any leadership candidate in the 2018 grassroots leadership race.”
Leaving any candidate out “would be a slap in the face to our hundreds of thousands of members,” they wrote, and “any attempt to block any candidate will be meet (sic) with hostilities by the PC party executive and a motion will be tabled to overturn your decision.”
Brown is the only candidate who hasn’t been given the go-ahead; Tanya Granic Allen, Christine Elliott, Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney are all cleared to run. Hillier has endorsed Elliott.
The party executive has been in flux, but at last count it had 24 members. Not all of the 10 people threatening to revolt have votes, either. But they’re still a meaningful bloc of senior Tories who could make even more trouble for the party.
Brown has been charged with no crime. He has been accused of unwanted sexual advances
( by two women, not publicly named), of inflating party membership rolls ( by interim leader Vic Fedeli), of using party funds improperly ( by Hillier), and of getting into an odd but ultimately aborted arrangement to sell his share of a bar in Barrie to a Brampton paralegal who later became a Tory candidate (in a story published Monday night in the Globe and Mail).
Expect more, Brown said Tuesday before Hillier filed his complaint, via one of the Facebook posts he’s been using to defend himself.
“You know this movement is bigger than any one of us — it’s bigger than one individual, it’s bigger than our party and it’s bigger and more powerful than a select group of individuals who feel entitled to destroy what we’ve built together these past three years,” he wrote. “I’m deeply disappointed to say this but those individuals — the forces who brought us here today, are back again. I want you to know that over the next weeks you may hear or see stories questioning my integrity, character and my leadership of our party.”
In the same message, Brown
sort of explained how he came to claim that the Tories had 200,000 members on Jan. 13, but Fedeli now says the number is more like 133,000. The party had 180,000 paid-up members in December, Brown wrote.
“I urged caucus and candidates to work hard to get that number over 200,000. At the end of that month and in January of 2018, thousands of memberships expired. This can all be verified easily. There is one person at party headquarters who looks after every single membership form and verifies the payment. He should be allowed to speak but won’t be allowed to because he will speak the truth,” Brown wrote.
This seems to mean that when Brown boasted of the 200,000 number, he was including people who’d recently let their memberships lapse.
Brown himself wasn’t at Queen’s Park on Tuesday to take his seat as the legislature resumed following a winter break. When he left, he was party leader, planted in the middle of the opposition’s front bench. His new place, as an MPP with no party claiming him, is in a back corner tucked behind another former Tory whom Brown himself ejected months ago: Carleton-Mississippi Mills MPP Jack MacLaren.