Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party is about to succumb to its worst nightmare. The party people thought they could never do worse than Timmy Hudak as their leader. They had obviously never met Barrie’s own Patrick Brown MP.
Timmy Hudak made his signature promise in last year’s provincial election at the Barrie Country Club. Sitting in the front row for that elite event was Patrick Brown MP. It was Brown who jumped up afterwards and congratulated Leader Hudak for promising to fire 100,000 provincial employees. The Progressive Conservative provincial campaign was all downhill from there.
Maybe Brown was already planning his strategy for the provincial leadership at that time. It was about 35 years ago—when Brown was still in diapers—that a couple young Liberals in Toronto found that you need not add new members to your membership lists one at a time. By finding the brokers, you can add members by the hundreds and even by thousands. They worked with the wholesalers.
The political parties solved the problem this created by insisting that the party leader sign off on all party nominations. Nobody realized that the most vulnerable position was that of the party leader. The fact that Patrick Brown saw that weakness and has acted on it is not to his credit. This was especially galling in that the taxpayers and lobbyists paid for the trips to the sub-continent to put Brown in touch with both ends of the stream of people from there coming to Canada. More than 400,000 settled in Ontario.
It was a slam-dunk for Brown to sign up enough newcomers to Ontario to dominate the very low level of membership in the Ontario party after the Hudak years. Brown’s 40,000 new members represent more than 50 per cent of the total memberships. He hardly needed MPP Monte McNaughton’s Coalition-Life memberships to fatten his numbers.
But there is still the question of who paid as much as $400,000 for Brown’s memberships from the sub-continent. According to Patrick Brown’s own figures, he did not even raise that much for his campaign. While people calling these new members might become a little incredulous about what these new Ontarians tell them, it is proving that there are any improper moves by Mr. Brown that is the difficulty.
But what is particularly outrageous about this is the nerve of Patrick Brown to stand before the party members and talk about a new style of politics. He does not know any.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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