Patrick Brown MPP needs to decide whether he is his provincial party’s leader or its chief apparatchik. In politics, an apparatchik is a person who usually toils in the background of a party coming up with and implementing strategies and tactics with which to win power. Watching Mr. Brown at work in politics over the past ten years has been a constant series of lessons in sleaze, distain for voters, abuse of privilege, careless accounting, hypocrisy and dissembling.
And besides, the man lacks personality. The first time we met him he offered to shake hands and it must have been an involuntary reaction that we snatched our hand away. Knowing nothing about him at the time, the reaction surprised us as well as him. We were told later that he has a limp and unconvincing handshake.
Very early in his public career, the young Mr. Brown must have realized he is a poor public speaker, with little to say that has not been written for him. To overcome this limitation, he chose to insinuate himself with local charities and piggyback himself on their needs. He spent record amounts of public funds sending cheap and unconvincing mailers to constituents promoting his party and this or that charity. You met the occasional ignorant Barrie native who would actually say “Mr. Brown really supports local charity.” That was all they knew about him.
The fact that Brown spent close to nine years in Ottawa as nothing but another vote for Mr. Harper tells his story. He was just another drone. He spent all that time contributing nothing. The only times he thought for himself, he voted for extremist religious motions that went nowhere.
It was when his friend MPP Tim Hudak crashed and burned as Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader in the last provincial election, Brown saw opportunity. One of his perks in Ottawa had been many free trips to the Indian Sub-Continent. He knew the size of the Indian Diaspora in Ontario was five times that of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party membership—and nobody had to be a Canadian citizen. All he had to do was hire organizers at Hindu temples and Muslim mosques. It was all in a day’s work for an unconscionable apparatchik. And nobody even checked if these people paid their own membership.
And today, in new, properly tailored suits and a Toronto salon hairstyle, Mr. Brown is living the life of Riley in Toronto. He has writers and female staff to hide his limitations.
But where do you find him? He is interfering in the campaigns of the Conservatives who are running in a Barrie Council by-election and he is in Whitby-Oshawa behind the scenes of the by-election to replace his provincial opponent Christine Elliott. Once an apparatchik; always an apparatchik!
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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