The best thing you can say about Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown is that he is a real piece of work. He is a person who works very hard at being what he is not. And if you think it only cost him $2 million to take over the leadership of the provincial party, you do not know Patrick as do those of us who live in Barrie.
Of course you are seeing a very different Patrick than what we are used to in Barrie. His handlers at Queen’s Park have scraped the manure off his boots and taken him to a Toronto hairstylist. They bought him properly cut and fitted suits, decent shirts and acceptable ties. Whether he remembers his Saturday night bath is something that only a mother would care to sniff out.
There have not been enough opportunities to hear him speak to say whether he is getting elocution training. It is likely they got him some decent speech writers. He used to get his prepared speeches from different cabinet offices in Ottawa. The quality was erratic but then so was MP Patrick Brown.
Now that he has found a sinecure of a very well-paid job for the next three years, you can be sure that Patrick does not miss his former buddies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Maybe they think he was smart getting out of a losing situation in Ottawa when he did. He only knew that there was nowhere for him to go in the Conservative caucus. The Harper Conservatives treated him as worthless because they knew and used him.
The word we are hearing from Ontario’s South Asian community is that in signing up of tens of thousands of their community around the province, the $10 party membership fee was optional. Strange is it not that there is no mention of maybe more than $300,000 for memberships in Patrick’s submission to Elections Ontario. And that might not be the first time the boy forgot to report all his expenditures in an election.
Mind you, Ontario Progressive Conservative Party President Richard Ciano has been quoted as saying that our Patrick did not break any of the party rules. The rules for Ontario Conservatives must be a moving target. We always heard that people had to pay their own membership fees. We even heard that people were supposed to know what they were signing when they signed a membership. We bet the people running the balloting for the party leadership had some interesting stories.
The funny thing in Barrie is that nobody here seems to care that American-owned Molson-Coors (part owners of Ontario’s Beer Store) gave Brown $5,000 to aid his campaign. Yet there are Barrie residents who used to support the Barrie Colts hockey team who are quite annoyed that the Colts organization was also reported to have contributed $5,000.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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