Will The Real Patrick Brown Please Stand Up?
Will The Canadidate For Nobody Make Up His Mind?
It would have August 31st, I guess, the last day of August in 2016, if my memory serves me correct.
The prior Sunday I had taken a bus down to Toronto, because at the peak of drama around my parents’ divorce I had decided to get the fuck out of dodge and leave for Toronto, where I stayed with the family of a University friend and helped the Ontario Liberals with their final week of the Scarborough-Rouge River byelection campaign, which the Liberals would end up losing as a precursor to their disastrous 2018 result. But that’s not what sticks out from that week, it’s the conversation I had with what I’ll only describe as a Senior Ontario Liberal that sticks with me.
Me, the naïve political science student that I was, was of the view then that the Ontario Liberals would be lucky to stay in second at the 2018 election, and yet the mood in Toronto, amongst senior Liberals, was fine. They genuinely believed they’d win the Rouge River byelection, and the 2018 election, and they were loose lipped about the source of their confidence. “We have women on camera” was what I was told during a canvassing trip, referencing Patrick Brown, the then leader of the PCs. I didn’t bother asking for further clarity on what, exactly, they were on camera claiming, but this Senior Liberal was clear, Brown was going down.
Bob Fife would, of course, report on allegations against the PC Leader in due time, but he did so in January 2018, with enough time for the PCs to get rid of Brown and replace him with Doug Ford, who would lead the PCs back to government, but as the idea of Patrick Brown running for the Federal Tory Leadership comes back, I keep thinking about those five words.
“We have women on camera.”
…
Is the real Patrick Brown the pro-carbon pricing moderate who told his caucus to sit down and shut up on a bill designed to make it easier for gay parents to be given the legal status they deserve, or is he the social conservative who kept telling ethnic media in Toronto and the western GTA that he would repeal the sex-ed curriculum if he won the 2018 election? Is he the sexual predator that Fife’s never-retracted reporting paints him as, or the occasionally horny but no worse than that single man that his version of those events paints him as? More bluntly, who is the former MP for Barrie who somehow became the Mayor Of Brampton? (Update, March 9th: CTV finally retracted their reporting on Brown this morning. I’m going to leave the column as is.)
Brown is the great enigma of this race, and of this country’s politics, because he is everything to everybody, depending on who wants him at any given time. He beat Christine Elliott by being an excellent organizer with ethnic minorities against the establishment Elliott, and then he split his time as leader between tacking left to win over blue Liberals and making sure his right flank knew he could be trusted. He was an incoherent, ideologically insane mess of a leader who masked all that disfunction behind a 15% polling lead because Kathleen Wynne had an approval rating sub-Nickelback. It was easy enough for him to lead the PCs because they could unite around “Fuck Wynne”, and even then he struggled.
He managed to get his party to back the Federal carbon tax as a backstop because his electorate was assured of his real conservatism because of all the sex ed fights, but also because they had last won an election 18 years before he released that manifesto. There was a “fuck it, we’ll accept this” because they were so desperate to win, but here, now, the federal Tories aren’t there yet, which means Brown isn’t going to be able to paper over the cracks like he did last time.
I referred to my position on Brown on Twitter last week as mildly hedging, but in reality I was scared for no reason. Brown won because Elliott took for granted that she was the right choice and assumed she could win easily. Brown won’t have that advantage, because Skippy will fight like hell. Could Brown sign up a ton of members? Sure, but they’ll all be in 27 ridings, meaning that the Tory Party’s anti-majoritarian voting system will fuck him over. Could he become the moderate wing’s standard bearer? I mean, I guess, but the problem with Brown is that there’s a pretty easy attack line against him whichever lane he takes.
If he runs as a moderate, you hit him for the sex-ed stuff and the refusal to ever condemn Sam Oosterhoff and the legion of cranks in his own party, and if he tries to pivot, just take him to task for the carbon tax. The problem with having no political spine, no central ideology, is that you can be everything to everybody, or you can be nothing to nobody, and in a Conservative leadership race with Lewis for the true-blue Social Conservatives, Charest for the old PCs, and Skippy for the rest, where the fuck does Brown find a lane to more than 7%?
The theory of Patrick Brown can make a lot of sense, it really can. But the theory of me marrying a woman also makes sense. The problem is, life got in the way for me, and the fact that Patrick Brown is the candidate for nobody means the potential won’t ever be met, and he won’t even come close to winning the Conservative Leadership.