Not being on the inside with the conservatives, I do not make accusations about things that I cannot prove. Knowing Patrick Brown, as I do, and having followed Pierre Poilievre over the years, it was no surprise when the Toronto Star accused Poilievre’s campaign of sabotaging Brown’s candidacy for the federal conservative leadership. It was so damn obvious but there was no way I could prove it. The Toronto Star could.
It was like Brown’s financial reports on his federal election campaigns. You knew he knew the rules. He also had the knowledge of how to skate around the rules. In his last federal election, I could never find his bus in his financial reports. It annoyed me that he could hide the cost of more than a month of renting a forty-passenger bus in his report. That bus was covered with Brown’s signs and it showed up in the most interesting places. The only time you could complain was on election day and it was supposedly taking seniors to the polls. By the time the returning office official could get to the poll where you had reported it, the bus had moved on.
It was no secret though that Brown was a stalking horse for his friend John Charest (the former Quebec premier) in the last federal conservative leadership race. Poilievre’s concern was not that Brown had more sign-ups as temporary conservatives than Poilievre. The concern was that Brown’s second votes were all expected to go to Charest. If this was the case and Poilievre did not have more than 50 per cent of the first count votes, the vagaries of ranked voting might cause Charest to win.
But by disqualifying Brown, you not only burned his first votes but you have gotten rid of many of his second and third votes with them. And besides, with Brown out of the race, Poilievre was obviously a first-vote winner.
Were the conservative party officials right to kick Patrick Brown out of the leadership race? They probably were. What does not make sense is the word that got out was that he had broken some election laws. If this was true, the conservative officials had a responsibility to report it to the chief electoral officer. If the infraction was illegal, the chief electoral officer would have turned the matter over to the RCMP. I am not sure that happened. That detail is not included in the Toronto Star story.
-30-
Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to: