PC Leader Brown breezes to byelection win
New provincial Tory chief takes Simcoe North, makes jabs at Wynne in speech COLDWATER, ONT.— After four months on the sidelines at Queen’s Park, Patrick Brown will take a seat opposite Premier Kathleen Wynne when the legislature returns from its summer break Sept. 14.
The new Progressive Conservative leader easily won a byelection in Simcoe North late Thursday night, increasing his party’s share of the vote and securing a paycheque from taxpayers that will earn him about $180,000 a year.
Brown’s victory followed a short August campaign that saw him slam the Liberals for electricity prices, a provincial retirement pension plan, credit rating downgrades and scandals under investigation by the OPP.
Liberal attempts to “smear” him as a social conservative backfired, Brown told reporters at a country club in this town northwest of Orillia where dozens of supporters, including MPPs and at least one federal cabinet minister, gathered for a victory celebration.
“The premier’s strategists at Queen’s Park are going to be scratching their heads because their approach was an utter failure here,” added Brown, who also accused Wynne of “shirking her duties” by wading into the federal campaign.
“I can’t wait to be in the legislature to hold Premier Wynne accountable,” he said.
With all but 17 polls reporting, Brown had 53.2 per cent of the vote to 23.8 per cent for the Liberals and 17 per cent for the NDP.
The balloting took place a day after New Democrats complained that the Brown campaign placed an ad in the Orillia Packet and Times, breaking an Elections Ontario blackout on advertising before the vote. Brown officials blamed the ad on human error.
Brown was elected leader of the party in May, beating veteran MPP Christine Elliott, who resigned her Whitby-Oshawa seat last Friday. A byelection there is not expected until the new year.
The former Barrie MP portrayed himself as a local boy in Simcoe North, citing family ties in the riding that forms a horseshoe around the top part of Lake Simcoe and extends north to Midland and Penetanguishene. Wynne called the vote a month ago after the surprise resignation of veteran Conservative MPP Garfield Dunlop, who had criticized Brown during the PC leadership campaign as not up to the job.
Wynne initially planned to delay the byelection until after the Oct. 19 federal election to avoid confusing voters, but relented under pressure from Brown.
He faced veteran Liberal activist Fred Larsen, a retired Orillia teacher who had run previously in Simcoe North, and New Democrat Elizabeth Van Houtte, a social work professor at the Lakehead University campus in Orillia.
Both took shots at Brown during the campaign for living in Barrie and not in the riding. He promised to move to Simcoe North soon.
Liberals used the campaign, which unfolded throughout this cottage country area, to paint Brown as a hard-right conservative who voted against abortion choice and samesex marriage as an MP under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Brown pledged to not reopen the abortion debate and stressed he led his party’s first official delegation to Toronto’s Pride parade in June, leaving Liberal cabinet minister Brad Duguid to charge that “his rhetoric doesn’t stack up.”
Larsen frequently took Brown to task for qualifying for a $45,000 annual pension after nine years as an MP in Ottawa while leaving Ontarians without workplace pensions to fend for themselves by opposing Wynne’s Ontario Retirement Pension Plan as a “job killer.”
Van Houtte tried to convince voters electing her would send a message to Wynne to stop the partial sell-off of Hydro One.
Larsen faced heat from some voters, who compared the sale of the Crown utility to the Mike Harris PC government’s decision to lease the lucrative Hwy. 407 to a private firm, costing the province millions in foregone revenues.
Valerie Powell, who ran for the Green party, raised concerns about the need to protect farmland.