Ontario PCs face savage campaign
Committee gives Brown OK to try to regain leadership of broken party
Patrick Brown can run for the leadership of the party that ditched him in January, a committee of senior Progressive Conservatives ruled Wednesday.
In doing so, they avoided an immediate revolt by supporters of the former leader. And they set the stage for a savage two weeks of campaigning up to the deadline for Tory members to vote.
Brown will be the only one with a plausible platform the party could put to the people of Ontario in a general-election campaign, the result of a yearlong development process. Plenty of Tories grumbled about the result, especially that it included signing up for a $4-billion-ayear federal carbon tax, but it’s a platform that essentially hangs together.
Doug Ford, Christine Elliott, Caroline Mulroney and Tanya Granic Allen all want to throw out parts of Brown’s “People’s Guarantee” that bring in revenue but keep other parts that spend the money they’d no longer have.
In their first debate last week, they all said pretty much the same thing about discarding the carbon tax, all of them ignored the practical difficulty of stopping the feds from imposing one and all of them denied that doing so would blow a hole in their imagined government’s budget. As long as everyone on stage is sharing the same hallucinations, it’s hard for anyone to force them to confront reality.
Whatever else he is, Brown is not dumb. He won’t let the others get away with their wishful thinking.
But nor will they let him ignore the pile of difficult questions that have surfaced since Brown resigned four weeks ago after reports that he’d been sexually aggressive toward two women, including one who worked for him. Now there’s interim leader Vic Fedeli talking about “rot” in the party that Brown presided over; a multi-part ethics complaint fellow MPP Randy Hillier has filed over trips Hillier alleges Brown accepted improperly and whether Brown can legitimately afford his expensive home on Lake Simcoe; his relationship with a woman that started when she was a political intern; and an odd, unconsummated deal to sell his share of a Barrie bar to a Brampton man who ended up as an uncontested party candidate not long afterward.
Brown denies all allegations of impropriety and says he’s the victim of a “select group of individuals who feel entitled to destroy what we’ve built together these past three years.”
This was the dilemma members of the Progressive Conservative party’s nomination committee faced.
Do they let Brown seek to reclaim his place at the top of the party — pitting him and his supporters against practically the whole caucus, making the next three weeks an internal referendum on how bad sexual misconduct allegations need to be to cost a politician his job, guaranteeing fresh purges if he wins and opening the possibility that the bulging file of other new complaints about Brown from within the party will become the Liberals’ and New Democrats’ attack ads in the upcoming election campaign?
Or do they cut him out of the race — confirming his defenders’ claims that he’s been denied due process, infuriating tens of thousands of people who joined the Tories while he was leader and leaving him with nothing to lose in taking the fight further, including maybe to court?
Brown is at the centre of the Tories’ civil war and he’s made it clear he’s not going away. At least within the confines of a leadership race, he’ll have to behave semi-predictably, and if he loses fair and square that should be the end of him. But the fight among the five candidates will still ultimately be about Brown, his leadership and his conduct, not about what direction to take a post-Brown party.
The situation has a recent precedent in Britain’s Labour party.
Jeremy Corbyn was an outsider candidate with slim caucus support when he won a mass vote and became leader. He clashed with party veterans and played a lacklustre role in the failed campaign to keep Britain in the European Union. Most of his shadow cabinet quit on him, he lost a non-confidence vote in caucus and had to stand up in a fresh membership vote, which he won handily. The caucus is stuck with him.
His fellow Labour MPs dislike Corbyn mainly because he’s way to their left and a grump, though. Nobody’s accused him of creeping on women or shady financial dealings. Plus, Corbyn always had a corps of several dozen caucus supporters; in the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus now, Brown has two.
The Corbyn-led Labour party rode his renewed momentum to, er, continued opposition status, though they cut Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s government to a minority.
The Ontario Tories’ vote, a multi-day affair with results due March 10, will be done with ranked ballots, producing instant run-off results. Brown probably won’t be too many members’ second choice. But nobody should underestimate his organizing skills, his work ethic or the importance of the fact that most party members signed up while he was leader. This’ll be a mighty fight.