Patrick Brown’s time for on-job training over

Ontario Tory Leader Patrick Brown spent last week rolling out a set-piece announcement a day about things he’ll do if he can hold the Progressive Conservative party together long enough to win an election next year.

It gave conservatives something to talk about other than the meatgrinder of the party’s nomination process, which keeps splatting out bloody messes.

The legislature isn’t sitting and Premier Kathleen Wynne has mostly been on holiday since Canada Day. The field at home has been open for Brown to practise for next year’s campaign. He’s been going around with his sleeves rolled up and his collar undone, just the way Dalton McGuinty did, though Brown wears a blue tie instead of a red one.

“I hope we can start pointing our guns outward,” a Tory MPP told me, hopeful that having hired people whose only task is to prepare for next spring’s campaign will help.

But, well, it hasn’t yet. Brown and the team are knee-deep in angry would-be candidates alleging they’ve been victimized by rigged or sloppy nomination votes. The latest is in Scarborough Centre, where apparently the party wasn’t ready for a crush of voters, and nobody’s sure what happened to the ballot boxes.

The party picked political novice Thenusha Parani to run against Liberal minister Brad Duguid, who’s won four elections in a row with outright majorities. The CBC quotes the riding’s last PC MPP, Mike Harris cabinet minister Marilyn Mushinski, saying the nomination meeting was a mess and, worse: “I think it would be an absolute disaster if Patrick Brown became the next premier of the province.” Oy.

Meanwhile, the Liberals are passing around an affidavit filed by PC party president Rick Dykstra in a court battle over another nomination fight, this one in Hamilton where Brown has cast aside the results of a contested nomination meeting.

“The nomination meeting is not determinative of who will ultimately be listed on the ballot as the PC Party candidate in a general election,” Dykstra’s affidavit says. The leader ultimately decides — which is completely true, but not a great look for a party that boasts about its open nominations and allergy to decrees from the leader’s office.

The Liberals are soon to have senior officials go on trial for allegedly trying to bribe an inconvenient candidate out of a nomination race in Sudbury and then other senior figures go on trial for allegedly criminal mishandling of public documents. The Tories’ fights do not, so far, involve search warrants.

But when Tory riding-association boards in swing ridings are quitting, former cabinet ministers are calling the leader a disaster, and elements of the base are wandering off to join fringe parties, all is not well.

One argument goes that Brown carved his way up to the leadership of a hollowed-out and demoralized party, putting in the work to beat the presumptive favourite, Christine Elliott, in a riding-by-riding vote. That required a tremendous work ethic and a particular set of skills. But holding together a coalition of social conservatives, libertarians and Bay Street types while convincing centrist suburbanites to go blue requires another set that Brown is still acquiring.

Maybe. Here’s another possible explanation: Brown is not that great a politician. His triumphs since his leadership win have been few — two byelection wins that took seats from Liberals. The nomination battles are getting messier. The Dykstra affidavit says that when Brown appointed a candidate in that Hamilton squabble, the point was to smother the noise.

Ontario needs and deserves a competent alternative to the Liberals in 2018. The Liberals are as vulnerable now as they’ve been since 2003, but they won’t lie meekly down while Brown learns.