Approving Brown’s bid a bad call for PCs
The nominations and vetting team of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party was between a rock and a hard place concerning Patrick Brown.
Had they rejected his plan to retake the party leadership, they would have faced a membership mutiny from many of the PC members Brown himself brought in when he originally sought to become leader.
On the other hand, approving his leadership drive opens the party to huge risk going forward and during the election campaign, given that Brown would become the story, not the PC platform.
The party opted for the latter. It’s a questionable decision, but under the circumstances, not entirely surprising.
The PCs are deeply fractured along partisan and leadership lines. Christine Elliott, Caroline Mulroney, Tanya Granic Allen and Doug Ford supporters were already pulling the party apart before Brown’s surprising decision to apply again for the job he got fired from by his own party just a short time ago. This will not improve things.
It’s not just the allegations of sexual misconduct, which Brown denies. It’s not just the questionable real estate situations outlined by the Globe and Mail this week. It’s not just allegedly doctored membership lists, which Brown denies responsibility for but which nonetheless happened on his watch. It’s not just the questionable spending on travel and legal payments, or the botched nomination process that has resulted in the need to hold new meetings in at least two ridings. It’s not the new accusations from PC MPP Randy Hillier that Brown unethically took trips around the world at party expense. It’s not even that the majority of Brown’s own former caucus want him gone.
It’s all that and more. By putting his own interests ahead of the party’s, Brown has demonstrated he’s not fit to be Opposition leader or premier. His Trumpian claims that he is the victim of some shadowy conspiracy from within the conservative establishment throw further doubt on his judgment.
Brown’s proclamation that he has been exonerated of the sex allegations are false. One of the two women involved has now changed significant details of her story, but not the substance of it, and other allegations remain. And CTV, which reported the allegations, is standing behind its story. Brown has every right to fight to clear his name, but the fact that he’s doing so during the leadership race, at the expense of his party, is further evidence of his lack of fitness.
If Brown does win the leadership, he can expect all the accusations and allegations levelled at him, including by his caucus colleagues, to dominate virtually every stop along the campaign trail. That will happen at the expense of policy and substance. The campaign storyline will become Brown and the dysfunctional PCs.
The Liberals and NDP must be smiling.