PC PARTY IN TURMOIL
HOW WE GOT HERE (IN A SMALL NUTSHELL)
On Jan. 25, CTV News aired a story with two women saying Patrick Brown had been sexually aggressive toward them in his home, after they had been drinking and he had not. The Progressive Conservative caucus and party executive told him they wouldn’t support his initial plan to stay on and fight through the allegations, and Brown resigned.
His interim successor, former finance critic Vic Fedeli, said he wanted to take the party through the election due in June but the party executive rejected that idea and called a quick leadership race. The candidates are Caroline Mulroney (a Tory candidate in York-Simcoe), Doug Ford (the former Toronto city councillor), Christine Elliott (a former MPP for Whitby), Tanya Granic Allen (a social conservative and leader of a group formed to assert parents’ rights in sex education) and, most recently, Brown himself, who announced hours before a deadline last Friday that he’ll try to get his old job back by appealing directly to party members.
The vote is to be conducted online and by mail between March 2 and 8, with results announced March 10.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR NEXT
Brown’s right to run for the party leadership again isn’t automatic. The key qualification in question is that candidates have to be eligible to run for the Progressive Conservatives in the next election. Brown is already the party’s nominated candidate in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte, but Fedeli kicked him out of the Tory caucus hours before he announced his leadership plans, and nominations can be overturned by the Tories’ “provincial nominations committee.”
They’ve already done it twice, vacating two nominations for candidates Brown had protected as leader, who were picked in local nomination votes many said were bogus. The prospect of a sitting MPP who was just ejected from his party caucus seeking to lead that same party is unprecedented.
The nominations committee includes Brown loyalists and enemies. So does the party executive, which is a different group; many of them have promised a revolt if Brown’s candidacy for leader is forbidden.