Ontario Progressive Conservative party leader Patrick Brown, left, raises his hands in victory with leadership candidate Christine Elliott after winning the PC party leadership in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2015.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Patrick Brown, the energetic upstart federal Conservative MP from Barrie, is the new leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party.
The little-known 36-year-old federal backbencher upset Christine Elliott, 60, the MPP for Whitby-Oshawa and favourite of the party establishment.
"I'm excited. We are going to move mountains, we are going to build a better and greater Ontario," he said, surrounded by caucus members and his family on stage. "We will win the next election."
Mr. Brown won by a decisive margin, with 62 per cent of the vote. Roughly a thousand party faithful crowded into the Toronto Congress Centre, in a suburban industrial park near Pearson Airport, to hear the results Saturday.
An athletic bachelor with a Dippity-do hairstyle reminiscent of a '90s boy band, Mr. Brown thoroughly out-hustled Ms. Elliott, selling 41,000 memberships. He drew much of his support from new Canadians and other people outside the PCs' traditional base.
He also scored high-profile endorsements from Wayne Gretzky and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Although Mr. Brown ran to the right of Ms. Elliott and courted social conservatives – he voted to re-open the abortion debate while in Ottawa, and campaigned against the Ontario Liberal government's sexual education curriculum – he pledged after his win to take a pragmatic approach as leader.
"I want a member of our party on every block in every neighbourhood across the province, reconnecting with the people of Ontario," he said. "A party that judges every idea based on merit, not by the colour of the jersey worn by the person proposing it. Whether the idea comes from Main Street or Bay Street, an MPP or a grassroots member of our party or another."
Later, he told reporters he would take divisive social issues off the table: "Social issues; we're not going to be revisiting those."
In his speech, Mr. Brown thanked his supporters in their native languages, doling out greetings in Tamil, Mandarin, Arabic and Tagalog. He also delivered a substantial part of his speech in fluent French, a rarity among Ontario PC politicians.
And he went out of his way to appeal to government employees and union members, telling them he would "welcome them back into the PC family" and "we have more in common than we have differences."
Under previous leader Tim Hudak, the party adopted a Thatcherite bent, promising to slash the size of government and picking fights with trade unions. Mr. Hudak's pledge to cut 100,000 government jobs was widely blamed for costing the party last year's election.
The PCs currently form the opposition in Ontario, with 28 of the legislature's 107 seats, and have lost four elections to the governing Liberals since 2003. They have had particular trouble winning seats in the Toronto area, where Mr. Brown focused his campaign.
The 11-month race to replace Mr. Hudak began with five candidates. But moderate MPPs Vic Fedeli and Lisa MacLeod both dropped out to support Ms. Elliott last winter. Then last month, rightwing MPP Monte McNaughton quit the contest and threw his support to Mr. Brown.
The election was carried out using a modified one-member-one-vote system, in which each provincial riding was worth 100 points, allocated proportionately to each candidate's share of the vote in the riding. Voting took place last Sunday and Thursday, and party volunteers counted them overnight Friday.
According to the party, 49.3 per cent of the 76,587 eligible voters voted.
As the results of the election were read out riding-by-riding shortly before noon Saturday, Mr. Brown swiftly jumped into the lead. He sat stoically, watching the screen with his sisters Fiona and Stephanie, as his supporters leapt to their feet and banged thunder sticks all around him.
"Thank you Jesus!" shouted one woman on Mr. Brown's side of the hall as it became clear he would win. "Change is coming!" hollered one man.
Mr. Brown utterly dominated the 905 belt of suburbs around Toronto – so called because of its area code – and did well in Ottawa, Hamilton and Niagara Region. Ms. Elliott, for her part, did best in rural Ontario and downtown Toronto.
In her concession speech, Ms. Elliott declared the result "unanimous" and congratulated Mr. Brown.
"We should be proud of everything we achieved," she said to her supporters. She said she was confident Progressive Conservatives will "unite around" Mr. Brown's leadership.
The soft-spoken Ms. Elliott was considered the establishment candidate and all but five PC MPPs supported her. She ran a firmly centrist campaign, declaring her intent to emulate the big-tent, moderate approach of former Red Tory premier Bill Davis. And she emphasized her aptitude for health and social service policy, traditionally deficiencies in the party.
Now the really hard work for Mr. Brown begins. He needs to convince an MPP in his caucus to give up his or her seat so that he can sit in the legislature. More importantly, he needs to build relationships with his caucus.
An Elliott strategist noted that Mr. Brown's social conservative positions have angered some PC MPPs. Mr. McNaughton, for instance, once mocked Ms. Elliott's pledge to build a "big blue tent" by saying she would actually build a "little pink tent." Mr. McNaughton was accused of homophobia for that and other comments, charges he denied but which left a bad taste for many in the party.
He will also have to win over moderate party members.
"I am just totally shocked," Sharon Trbovich, a long-time Progressive Conservative and Elliott supporter, from Ms. Elliott's Whitby-Oshawa riding, said on the convention floor. "This is a different party. I don't recognize it. I'm not sure I understand it. Right now it doesn't feel like a place I belong."
She said was concerned that the party could become more socially conservative.
"I don't support any of the social conservative policies. … In fact, I feel that I have a much broader version of the party. And if it's a socially conservative party, it's not my party anymore."
Indeed, despite Mr. Brown's assurances he will keep a lid on social issues, his victory came about in large part because he won over the party's most rightwing members.
Mike Jackubcak, a Brown organizer from Ajax-Pickering and Scarborough East, said Mr. Brown won the leadership in large part by reaching out to social conservatives. He said Ms. Elliott had tacked too much to the centre, making the party's right feel excluded.
"At the end of the day people want fundamental change, they don't want to wake up one morning, like in Alberta with 10 seats," he said. "When she went after the social conservatives … it began to change people's minds whether she was the candidate."
He said he was talking to a number of people who had supported Mr. McNaughton and didn't know who to support. But he said "when the information was presented to them about the issues that were of concern to them, primarily the sex education, many people started switching to Patrick en masse."
Brown supporter Ajmer Mandur from Kitchener-Waterloo, who ran federally in 2006, said he signed up 500 supporters for Mr. Brown.
"I truly believe in his passion for the party, his view, his vision for the future of the province. I think we share a lot of values together," he said. "There's social values and there's fiscal values."
The Liberals immediately trotted out Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca to attack Mr. Brown as a "tea-party" extremist, showing the kinds of lines they can be expected to use on him over the next three and a half years.
Mr. Brown, who pounds Red Bulls, runs road races and plays hockey in his spare time, has been in politics nearly his entire adult life.
He won election to Barrie city council in 2000 at age 22, then the House of Commons in 2006.
Although he never made cabinet in his nine years in Ottawa, Mr. Brown made key connections as chair of the Canada-India Parliamentary Friendship Association and as one of the caucus's point people on grassroots organizing in the Toronto suburbs.
His numerous trips to India allowed him to make the acquaintance of Mr. Modi, who showed up at one of Mr. Brown's rallies last month when the Indian PM was in Toronto on a state visit. Mr. Brown met Mr. Gretzky through a charity hockey tournament Mr. Brown runs; Mr. Gretzky endorsed him last winter.
In his victory speech, Mr. Brown referred to his friendship with Mr. Modi, who told him how he rebuilt his state of Gujarat before he became the country's leader. Mr. Modi fixed the roads, got cheaper power and cut red tape. He said Ontario has gridlock because of its bad roads, has high energy prices and excessive red tape.
"I want to make Ontario the easiest place to invest and not the most difficult," he told the crowd.
He also took a shot at the Liberal government, saying it "spends more time answering to police investigations than ensuring our winter roads are safe."
Mr. Brown, who introduced no policy during the leadership campaign, has three years before the October 2018 election to rebuild the PC Party.