Patrick Brown’s explosive tell-all lashes out at Progressive Conservative ‘enemies’
TheStar.com
November 15, 2018
Robert Benzie
Deposed former Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown’s explosive new tell-all book takes aim at the “enemies” --including Finance Minister Vic Fedeli --he blames for ousting him.
His memoir, Takedown: The Attempted Political Assassination of Patrick Brown, will be published Friday, but the Star obtained an advance copy.
Former Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown’s book is to be released Nov. 16, 2018.
Brown, elected mayor of Brampton last month, was forced out as Tory leader in January after CTV News broadcast allegations of a sex scandal involving two women. He is now suing CTV, which stands by its reporting, for $8 million.
He also alleges that last year a female staffer “accused Fedeli of inappropriate behaviour,” but she chose not to pursue a complaint.
“I understand that soon after Fedeli became interim party leader, the woman was let go, but kept on the legislative payroll,” Brown writes.
It’s not uncommon for political staff to be let go and receive severance pay following a change in leadership. The Star has not been able to confirm the allegation.
In a statement Wednesday, Fedeli said “these accusations from Patrick Brown are categorically false and without any merit.”
The treasurer, who is to deliver the fall economic statement Thursday, said Brown is “using his book to pursue old grievances” and warned he has “retained legal counsel and am prepared to take whatever action is necessary to hold any person making these false allegations accountable.”
In the 312-page tome, Brown claims that despite the sexual misconduct accusations broadcast by CTV, Doug Ford promised him “any position I wanted if I threw my organization behind his candidacy” during the March PC leadership.
“The lies in this book are disgusting,” the premier tweeted Wednesday night.
The ex-leader also lashes out at key advisers Alykhan Velshi, Dan Robertson, Andrew Boddington, and Nick Bergamini, who resigned en masse the night the CTV story broke, as “rats jumping ship” in his darkest hour.
“Not one of these guys was with me, as promised. I was alone,” Brown writes of his dramatic, but ill-advised 81-second news conference at Queen’s Park minutes before the allegations were broadcast.
“My team of backstabbers.”
Forced out later that evening by his caucus mates, he does not mince words about what happened.
“Some of my colleagues had transformed into hyenas.”
Prior to being succeeded as Tory chief by Ford --who beat Christine Elliott, Caroline Mulroney, and Tanya Granic Allen at the party’s March 10 leadership convention --Brown toyed briefly with a comeback as leader.
Yet even before that bid fizzled, he was already engaged in secret negotiations for his support with Elliott, Mulroney, and Ford.
“Caroline was someone I was thinking of backing for leadership, having no interest in running myself at that point,” Brown writes, adding her father, former prime minister Brian Mulroney, assured him “‘you’re going to be on her front bench, we can’t get into specifics, but you will be at the centre of her government.’”
That offer was made despite Caroline Mulroney’s public pronouncements about Brown’s alleged conduct.
“I was also being romanced by Elliott, who made the most attractive offer to me,” the former PC leader continues.
“We met for lunch in the TD Tower in Toronto, the meeting was to see what deal I might make with Elliott if I were to back her. Elliott was unbelievably nice, (she) was very straightforward. She told me that she could promise me deputy leader/deputy premier, but not minister of finance because she had already promised that to someone else,” he writes.
“Ford had also been calling everyone around me, asking me to join him at breakfast. He was saying that I could have any position I wanted if I threw my organization behind his candidacy. Ford, too, was prepared to make me an offer.”
In the end, he quietly backed Elliott in exchange for a promise he would be her minister of economic development and international trade.
“But Elliott’s campaign made a fatal mistake. They felt I was tainted goods, and they didn’t want me out there stumping for her. I had to be hidden,” writes Brown.
“What could I have done for Elliott had they let me? I could have won her Scarborough, Brampton, and Mississauga,” he continues.
“I had been vanquished and with that, so, too, were Elliott’s chances.”
Indeed, thanks to the Tories’ convoluted “points” system, Elliott lost to Ford despite winning the most votes and the most ridings.
In the book, Brown is at his most pointed when calling out his former colleagues for their policy U-turns.
He notes when he led the party, PC MPPs “voted for carbon pricing.” The Tories now oppose that and are spending $30 million on a constitutional challenge against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon-pricing plan that Brown endorsed.
“I have kept emails in which Vic Fedeli reiterated this was a great idea,” he writes, referring to the treasurer who is now an ardent opponent of putting a price on carbon.
Similarly, Brown recalls Mulroney, now the attorney general, “had been a big believer in climate change and carbon pricing.”
On sex education, he stresses the party “wanted to put this issue to bed” and keep former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne’s 2015 modernized curriculum that Ford has since scrapped.
Brown’s fractious relationship with his successor and now premier is another theme in the book.
“I often wonder whether or not those around Ford realize that most people didn’t vote for him or the PC party; they voted against Wynne. We could have run anyone, and it would not have mattered.”
He criticizes “Ford and his close associate and adviser Dean French,” now the premier’s chief of staff, for scuttling any hopes of him running as a Tory candidate in the June 7 election.
“I handed Ford a turnkey operation. To this day, I don’t really get it.”
Still, he conceded there was a “strained” relationship with Ford beginning after Brown’s deputy chief of staff, Pina Martino, asked him in 2015 “to stop dropping by” the office to visit his friend Kinga Surma, then a staffer and now Etobicoke Centre MPP, because “this created a media distraction.”
While Brown asked Ford to be the PC candidate in a 2016 Scarborough-Rouge River byelection won by Tory Raymond Cho, “in the end Ford decided against it.”
“As he told me: ‘I’m making too much money with my company and I’m not going to run.’”
Brown saves some choice words for his former caucus colleagues and rivals:
- On Fedeli: “His was the biggest betrayal because I always thought I treated him well. I recall that Fedeli sucked up to me non-stop with compliments like ‘you’re the best leader we ever had’ and ‘you inspire me.’ He’d lay it on thick; it was over the top at times. My experience with Fedeli was that he was extremely competent, but that he was also duplicitous and too ambitious for his own good.”
- On Lisa MacLeod, now the children, community, and social services minister and the first Tory MPP to denounce him after the CTV story broke: “Lisa MacLeod … was not a team player. She was just angry with everything, with everyone and with her situation in life. Members of caucus hated her.”
- On Granic Allen, the social conservative who ran for leader with an anti-Brown candidacy: “A prudish activist-turned-celebrity during the 2018 leadership, where she announced in a live TVO debate that students would do better in math if they weren’t learning about anal sex. Since then she has forever been crowned the ‘Anal Sex Lady’ amongst PC party members --not the way I’d want to be remembered, but different strokes for different folks, I suppose.”
He also castigates his team for problems with PC candidate nominations that remain under police investigation: “I finally lost it and held a conference call with (advisers): ‘For f- sake! This is becoming a s- show! I trusted you guys to run these nominations.’”
There are some mistakes in the book. Brown erroneously claims a leak of his People’s Guarantee manifesto last November had been “negotiated” with the Star. In fact, it was an unauthorized leak that his team knew nothing about.
Still, the then leader and his then-campaign team privately took credit for the “great coverage” of the centrist platform on the front page of the Saturday Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper.
“It was a victory because Wynne and her Liberals believed that … they had the ears of the Toronto Star, which played heavily in Toronto, an area dominated by Liberal-held ridings,” he writes.
