The Star’s view

PC party members, not a small group of insiders, deserve a chance to make their own decision on who should lead them,

No doubt a lot of Ontario Progressive Conservatives wish Patrick Brown would just quietly disappear. The noise surrounding his middle-of-the-night ouster as party leader and his increasingly frenetic efforts to rehabilitate himself have added an extra dimension of chaos to what was already a chaotic situation.

But that doesn’t mean party officials are wrong to give Brown the go-ahead to try and win back the PC leadership, as improbable and as divisive as that effort may seem.

Brown’s future, like the future of the party, should be decided by Ontario Conservatives as a whole, not by a small group of party insiders. Given his refusal to go away, that’s the only chance the PCs have to get past this bizarre episode and present something like a united front in time for the June 7 provincial election.

It would obviously be tempting to kick Brown out of the race and have done with it. There’s all kinds of evidence that he’s unsuited to be party leader, let alone premier.

There are the original accusations of sexual misbehaviour that led to his forced resignation in the first place on Jan. 25. Despite his claims to the contrary, they haven’t been dispelled.

There’s the “rot” that acting leader Vic Fedeli says he found once he got into the leader’s office and started looking under the hood. The inflated membership numbers, questionable candidate nominations and unexplained spending.

There’s the political indictment that MPP Randy Hillier issued on Tuesday, calling into question everything from Brown’s personal finances to who paid for his extensive globe-trotting, and even suggesting that he traded a party nomination for financial benefit.

Finally there’s the testimony of his 23-year-old girlfriend and one-time office intern, Genevieve Gualtieri. Ross Macdonald, the celebrated crime writer, once wrote wisely that “as a man gets older, if he knows what’s good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too.” Ontarians should ask themselves whether Brown, at the age of 39, really knows what’s good for him — and has the personal maturity to lead a province of more than 13 million people.

All these are good reasons not to support Patrick Brown. But they aren’t good reasons to deny Conservatives a chance to make their own decision on who should lead them.

If party insiders, in the form of the PCs’ nominations vetting committee, had tried to prevent him from seeking (actually reseeking) the leadership, it would have backfired on them.

Brown would certainly have appealed the decision to another party body, and perhaps to the courts. One way or the other, he would have remained the story.

And if he was disqualified in the end, a substantial share of the PCs’ grassroots members would have felt cheated. It’s impossible to say how many, but resentment at party “elites” manipulating the leadership race would surely have opened up new divisions in the party, which is already showing signs of cracking at the seams.

If Brown wasn’t allowed to run and have his support in the party tested in public, whoever emerges as the new leader on March 10 would always face questions about whether they had been fairly elected. It would be even harder for the winner to unite the party, figure out an electoral program and get ready to contest a general election less than three months later.

It’s hard not to be mesmerized by this political circus, something never before seen in Ontario’s normally placid public life. But amid all that, it’s important to keep in mind that whoever does emerge out of the chaos still has an excellent chance of actually becoming premier.

Anew poll this week suggests that the PCs under any of the major candidates, even including Brown, are still the odds-on favourites to defeat Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals.

All the more reason, despite partisan considerations and against all recent evidence, to hope that Ontario’s Conservatives will be able finally to get their act together and choose a decent, mature person to lead them.

Party officials are not wrong to give Patrick Brown the go-ahead to try and win back the PC leadership, as improbable and as divisive as that effort may seem