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Ottawa Valley MPP Randy Hillier intensified his campaign against former Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown on Tuesday, reporting him to the provincial integrity commissioner for alleged ethics violations — just after most of the Tory party’s executive threatened to revolt if Brown isn’t allowed to run to reclaim his place at the top of the party.
The integrity complaint, which Hillier released publicly at the end of the day, alleges that Brown accepted trips abroad from suppliers to the party, failed to report outside income in routine disclosures to the legislature, and raises questions about how he’s able to afford his home near Barrie.
Brown didn’t immediately have a response to the claims. Allegations like Hillier’s are meant to trigger a full investigation by integrity commissioner J. David Wake, a former judge.
Ontario Conservative leadership candidate Patrick Brown addresses supporters and the media in Toronto on Sunday, February 18, 2018. The former party leader resigned his position after sexual misconduct allegations, only to re-enter race for his vacated position after refuting the allegations.
“On the weekend, I put out a statement in which I declared Mr. Brown to be unfit to be leader, unfit to be in the PC caucus, and unfit to be premier,” Hillier said in a fresh declaration against his former leader and caucusmate. “This statement was incomplete. He is also unfit to serve in the legislature.”
Brown has said he deserves “due process” in defending against sexual-misconduct allegations first aired on CTV News that led quickly to his resignation in January.
Hillier, the Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington MPP, has been a major Tory faction’s attack dog against Brown, who needs approval from a party committee to enter the race to succeed himself as leader. One qualification to run is to be eligible to run as a candidate for a seat in the legislature in the next election; Brown is officially the party’s nominee in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte. But Fedeli kicked Brown out of the Progressive Conservative caucus last Friday and now the party’s nominations committee could take the riding nomination away.
Brown was due for an interview with the committee Tuesday evening. These internal deliberations aren’t public and have no required timelines.
The committee nixes candidacies all the time — the frequency with which it did so when Brown was leader ticked off would-be candidates all over the province. It’s vacated two nominations since Brown resigned, over ballot-stuffing allegations that Brown himself didn’t consider serious.
Not so fast, say Brown loyalists in the party. There are lots of those. Ten of them, including several of the Progressive Conservative party’s numerous vice-presidents and the president of the party youth wing, wrote to the nominations committee to “demand that the (committee) not disallow the candidacy of any leadership candidate in the 2018 grassroots leadership race.”
Leaving any candidate out “would be a slap in the face to our hundreds of thousands of members,” they wrote, and “any attempt to block any candidate will be meet (sic) with hostilities by the PC party executive and a motion will be tabled to overturn your decision.”
Brown is the only candidate who hasn’t been given the go-ahead; Tanya Granic Allen, Christine Elliott, Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney are all cleared to run. Hillier has endorsed Elliott.
The party executive has been in flux since Brown resigned and party president Rick Dykstra quit shortly afterward as he faced his own sexual-assault allegation, but at last count it had 24 members. Not all of the 10 people threatening to revolt have votes, either. But they’re still a meaningful bloc of senior Tories who could make even more trouble for the party.
Brown has been charged with no crime. He has been accused of unwanted sexual advances (by two women, not publicly named), of inflating party membership rolls (by interim leader Vic Fedeli), of using party funds improperly (by Hillier), and of getting into an odd but ultimately aborted arrangement to sell his share of a bar in Barrie to a Brampton paralegal who later became a Tory candidate (in a story published Monday night in the Globe and Mail).
Expect more, Brown said Tuesday before Hillier filed his complaint, via one of the Facebook posts he’s been using to defend himself.
“You know this movement is bigger than any one of us — it’s bigger than one individual, it’s bigger than our party and it’s bigger and more powerful than a select group of individuals who feel entitled to destroy what we’ve built together these past three years,” he wrote. I’m deeply disappointed to say this but those individuals — the forces who brought us here today, are back again. I want you to know that over the next weeks you may hear or see stories questioning my integrity, character and my leadership of our party.”
In the same message, Brown sort of explained how he came to claim that the Tories had 200,000 members on Jan. 13, but Fedeli now says the number is more like 133,000. The party had 180,000 paid-up members in December, Brown wrote.
“I urged caucus and candidates to work hard to get that number over 200,000. At the end of that month and in January of 2018, thousands of memberships expired. This can all be verified easily. There is one person at party headquarters who looks after every single membership form and verifies the payment. He should be allowed to speak but won’t be allowed to because he will speak the truth,” Brown wrote.
This seems to mean that when Brown boasted of the 200,000 number, he was including people who’d recently let their memberships lapse.
Brown himself wasn’t at Queen’s Park on Tuesday to take his seat as the legislature resumed following a winter break. When he left, he was party leader, planted in the middle of the opposition’s front bench. His new place, as an MPP with no party claiming him, is in a back corner tucked behind another former Tory who Brown himself ejected months ago: Carleton-Mississippi Mills MPP Jack MacLaren.
How we got here (in a small nutshell)
On Jan. 25, CTV News aired a story with two women saying Patrick Brown had been sexually aggressive toward them in his home, after they had been drinking and he had not. The Progressive Conservative caucus and party executive told him they wouldn’t support his initial plan to stay on and fight through the allegations, and Brown resigned.
His interim successor, former finance critic Vic Fedeli, said he wanted to take the party through the election due in June but the party executive rejected that idea and called a quick leadership race. The candidates are Caroline Mulroney (a Tory candidate in York-Simcoe), Doug Ford (the former Toronto city councillor), Christine Elliott (a former MPP for Whitby) and, most recently, Brown himself, who announced hours before a deadline last Friday that he’ll try to get his old job back by appealing directly to party members.
The vote is to be conducted online and by mail between March 2 and 8, with results announced March 10.
What to look for next
Brown’s right to run for the party leadership again isn’t automatic. The key qualification in question is that candidates have to be eligible to run for the Progressive Conservatives in the next election. Brown is already the party’s nominated candidate in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte, but Fedeli kicked him out of the Tory caucus hours before he announced his leadership plans, and nominations can be overturned by the Tories’ “provincial nominations committee.”
They’ve already done it twice, vacating two nominations for candidates Brown had protected as leader, who were picked in local nomination votes many said were bogus. The prospect of a sitting MPP who was just ejected from his party caucus seeking to lead that same party is unprecedented.
The nominations committee includes Brown loyalists and enemies. So does the party executive, which is a different group; many of them have promised a revolt if Brown’s candidacy for leader is forbidden.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The integrity complaint, which Hillier released publicly at the end of the day, alleges that Brown accepted trips abroad from suppliers to the party, failed to report outside income in routine disclosures to the legislature, and raises questions about how he’s able to afford his home near Barrie.
Brown didn’t immediately have a response to the claims. Allegations like Hillier’s are meant to trigger a full investigation by integrity commissioner J. David Wake, a former judge.
Ontario Conservative leadership candidate Patrick Brown addresses supporters and the media in Toronto on Sunday, February 18, 2018. The former party leader resigned his position after sexual misconduct allegations, only to re-enter race for his vacated position after refuting the allegations.
“On the weekend, I put out a statement in which I declared Mr. Brown to be unfit to be leader, unfit to be in the PC caucus, and unfit to be premier,” Hillier said in a fresh declaration against his former leader and caucusmate. “This statement was incomplete. He is also unfit to serve in the legislature.”
Brown has said he deserves “due process” in defending against sexual-misconduct allegations first aired on CTV News that led quickly to his resignation in January.
Hillier, the Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington MPP, has been a major Tory faction’s attack dog against Brown, who needs approval from a party committee to enter the race to succeed himself as leader. One qualification to run is to be eligible to run as a candidate for a seat in the legislature in the next election; Brown is officially the party’s nominee in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte. But Fedeli kicked Brown out of the Progressive Conservative caucus last Friday and now the party’s nominations committee could take the riding nomination away.
Brown was due for an interview with the committee Tuesday evening. These internal deliberations aren’t public and have no required timelines.
The committee nixes candidacies all the time — the frequency with which it did so when Brown was leader ticked off would-be candidates all over the province. It’s vacated two nominations since Brown resigned, over ballot-stuffing allegations that Brown himself didn’t consider serious.
Not so fast, say Brown loyalists in the party. There are lots of those. Ten of them, including several of the Progressive Conservative party’s numerous vice-presidents and the president of the party youth wing, wrote to the nominations committee to “demand that the (committee) not disallow the candidacy of any leadership candidate in the 2018 grassroots leadership race.”
Leaving any candidate out “would be a slap in the face to our hundreds of thousands of members,” they wrote, and “any attempt to block any candidate will be meet (sic) with hostilities by the PC party executive and a motion will be tabled to overturn your decision.”
Brown is the only candidate who hasn’t been given the go-ahead; Tanya Granic Allen, Christine Elliott, Doug Ford and Caroline Mulroney are all cleared to run. Hillier has endorsed Elliott.
The party executive has been in flux since Brown resigned and party president Rick Dykstra quit shortly afterward as he faced his own sexual-assault allegation, but at last count it had 24 members. Not all of the 10 people threatening to revolt have votes, either. But they’re still a meaningful bloc of senior Tories who could make even more trouble for the party.
Brown has been charged with no crime. He has been accused of unwanted sexual advances (by two women, not publicly named), of inflating party membership rolls (by interim leader Vic Fedeli), of using party funds improperly (by Hillier), and of getting into an odd but ultimately aborted arrangement to sell his share of a bar in Barrie to a Brampton paralegal who later became a Tory candidate (in a story published Monday night in the Globe and Mail).
Expect more, Brown said Tuesday before Hillier filed his complaint, via one of the Facebook posts he’s been using to defend himself.
“You know this movement is bigger than any one of us — it’s bigger than one individual, it’s bigger than our party and it’s bigger and more powerful than a select group of individuals who feel entitled to destroy what we’ve built together these past three years,” he wrote. I’m deeply disappointed to say this but those individuals — the forces who brought us here today, are back again. I want you to know that over the next weeks you may hear or see stories questioning my integrity, character and my leadership of our party.”
In the same message, Brown sort of explained how he came to claim that the Tories had 200,000 members on Jan. 13, but Fedeli now says the number is more like 133,000. The party had 180,000 paid-up members in December, Brown wrote.
“I urged caucus and candidates to work hard to get that number over 200,000. At the end of that month and in January of 2018, thousands of memberships expired. This can all be verified easily. There is one person at party headquarters who looks after every single membership form and verifies the payment. He should be allowed to speak but won’t be allowed to because he will speak the truth,” Brown wrote.
This seems to mean that when Brown boasted of the 200,000 number, he was including people who’d recently let their memberships lapse.
Brown himself wasn’t at Queen’s Park on Tuesday to take his seat as the legislature resumed following a winter break. When he left, he was party leader, planted in the middle of the opposition’s front bench. His new place, as an MPP with no party claiming him, is in a back corner tucked behind another former Tory who Brown himself ejected months ago: Carleton-Mississippi Mills MPP Jack MacLaren.
How we got here (in a small nutshell)
On Jan. 25, CTV News aired a story with two women saying Patrick Brown had been sexually aggressive toward them in his home, after they had been drinking and he had not. The Progressive Conservative caucus and party executive told him they wouldn’t support his initial plan to stay on and fight through the allegations, and Brown resigned.
His interim successor, former finance critic Vic Fedeli, said he wanted to take the party through the election due in June but the party executive rejected that idea and called a quick leadership race. The candidates are Caroline Mulroney (a Tory candidate in York-Simcoe), Doug Ford (the former Toronto city councillor), Christine Elliott (a former MPP for Whitby) and, most recently, Brown himself, who announced hours before a deadline last Friday that he’ll try to get his old job back by appealing directly to party members.
The vote is to be conducted online and by mail between March 2 and 8, with results announced March 10.
What to look for next
Brown’s right to run for the party leadership again isn’t automatic. The key qualification in question is that candidates have to be eligible to run for the Progressive Conservatives in the next election. Brown is already the party’s nominated candidate in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte, but Fedeli kicked him out of the Tory caucus hours before he announced his leadership plans, and nominations can be overturned by the Tories’ “provincial nominations committee.”
They’ve already done it twice, vacating two nominations for candidates Brown had protected as leader, who were picked in local nomination votes many said were bogus. The prospect of a sitting MPP who was just ejected from his party caucus seeking to lead that same party is unprecedented.
The nominations committee includes Brown loyalists and enemies. So does the party executive, which is a different group; many of them have promised a revolt if Brown’s candidacy for leader is forbidden.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
