Brown’s new problem: integrity complaints
Ottawa MPP details alleged ethics violations
An Ontario Conservative politician has stepped up his campaign against the candidate seeking to regain the leadership of the party, reporting Patrick Brown to the provincial integrity commissioner for alleged ethics violations.
T he i ntegrity complaint, which Randy Hillier released publicly at the end of the day, alleges that Brown accepted trips abroad from suppliers to the Ontario Progressive Conservative party and failed to report outside income in routine disclosures to the legislature. It also raises questions about how he’s able to afford his $ 2.3 million home near Barrie on a $ 120,000 salary. The home has a $ 1.7 million mortgage.
“Moreover since the member resigned his position as leader of the Official Opposition, the PC party has stopped paying the rent on his $ 3,000- per- month condo. The combined total of the mortgage payments and of the condo would roughly amount to $ 133,000 per year, or 111 per cent of the member’s base MPP income,” Hillier says in his complaint to the integrity commissioner.
Brown didn’t immediately have a response to the claims, although he did tell the Globe and Mail on Monday that his family helped him buy the home. Allegations like Hillier’s are meant to trigger a full investigation by integrity commissioner J. David Wake, a former judge.
“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 caucus- mate. “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 to his resignation as leader in January.
Hillier, an Ottawa Valley member of provincial parliament, 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. One qualification to run is to be eligible to run as a candidate for a seat in the legislature in the June 7 provincial election; Brown is officially the party’s nominee in BarrieSpringwater- Oro- Medonte. But interim leader Vic 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 was scheduled for an interview with the committee Tuesday evening. The deliberations aren’t public.
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 has 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.
There are lots of those. Ten of them, including several of the 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 met 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 goahead. 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 since Brown resigned and party president Rick Dyks- tra quit shortly afterward as he faced his own sexual- assault allegation, 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 unidentified women), inflating party membership rolls ( by interim leader Vic Fedeli), using party funds improperly ( by Hillier), and 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.
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.
BROWN SAID HE DESERVES ‘DUE PROCESS’ IN DEFENDING HIMSELF.