The national co-chair of Patrick Brown’s leadership campaign is the latest member of his team to now endorse Jean Charest as the best alternative to lead the federal Conservatives.
But it is not so certain that Mr. Brown’s supporters, many of whom seem new to the Conservative Party, will choose to follow this movement.
“It will all depend on the amount of work that [M. Brown] and its organizers will want to keep putting in this race,” said political strategist Chris Chapin, who previously worked as a digital communications adviser in Mr Brown’s office when he was Leader of the Official Opposition in the Assembly. Ontario legislation.
On Tuesday, the Charest team circulated a letter from former MP John Reynolds, who served as Brown’s campaign co-chair. In it, he says the former Quebec premier is the best choice to unite the party at a time when its divisions within caucus and the broader movement are on full display.
“We’ve had too much negative publicity lately, so we need to provide Canadians with a positive, unified and inclusive Conservative Party with a proven new leader,” Reynolds said.
The former Reform and Alliance MP from British Columbia does not mention Brown by name, nor does he discuss the disqualified candidate’s efforts to appeal his ousting from the leadership race.
But since the sudden disqualification of Mr. Brown a week ago, the situation has caught the attention of party authorities, as well as many activists and organizers of other teams.
The chairman of the committee that ultimately voted to expel Mr Brown explained that he did so on the recommendation of the party’s returning officer, based on an allegation that candidate Brown violated federal election laws.
A longtime organizer has since come forward as the one who alleges Mr Brown is involved in an arrangement that saw a private company pay for his volunteer work on the campaign.
Since his disqualification, Mr Brown has said his team have done nothing wrong and he has accused Conservative Party officials of refusing to provide full details of the incident when first asked to provide an explanation. He also retained the services of renowned lawyer Marie Henein to appeal his disqualification.
What will other Brown supporters do?
But unless Mr Brown is reinstated in the race, the question now is what will the Tory supporters that this candidate had recruited do by making them buy party membership cards during this leadership campaign.
The Brown team claims that the candidate sold 150,000 new “memberships”, although party headquarters has not validated that figure, nor any tallies announced by the other five candidates. By comparison, veteran MP Pierre Poilievre said he sold 312,000 membership cards.
Mr Brown’s strategy in this race had been to try and recruit new members to the party, rather than trying to curry favor with existing members – who he calculated were more likely to support Mr Poilievre and its populist messages.
He aimed to recruit thousands of people from the country’s immigrant and newcomer communities, promising to create a more inclusive party. He presented himself as an ally on specific issues of concern to them, from improving cricketing infrastructure to reforming the immigration system.
If this strategy is followed, his share of the vote that would fall into the Charest purse would depend on the will of Mr. Brown and his team to persuade his supporters to pledge their allegiance to the former premier of Quebec, said Mr Chapin.
But “those members signed up for Patrick,” Mr. Chapin recalled, because Mr. Brown ran a campaign that often seemed “at odds” with the party’s position on certain issues – the delisting of the Tamil Tigers as as a terrorist entity in Canada, for example. It would then be difficult, according to him, to persuade his supporters to support another candidate who has not made such promises. “You are asking activists to take a big leap of faith. »
“Pro-Charest” activists
Mr. Brown also spoke, during a call Monday evening, to supporters, many of whom, according to a spokesperson, were “activists on the ground” in his campaign. “There was overwhelming support for Mr. Charest among Mr. Brown’s supporters on that call,” Chisholm Pothier said Tuesday.
According to him, Mr. Brown “praised Mr. Charest”, his former political mentor. The spokesperson adds that the activists associated with the Brown campaign “think that Mr. Charest represents the best option” if their candidate is not reinstated in the race.
Mr. Pothier did not want, however, to qualify Mr. Brown’s message as official support for Mr. Charest’s candidacy.
Party spokesman Yaroslav Baran said on Tuesday that more than 280,000 ballots had already been mailed out, with another batch expected to be sent out by the end of the week.
Mr. Brown’s name will still appear on this final ballot, where members will have to rank the candidates, from their first choice to the last. This means his supporters could still choose Mr Brown as their first choice – intentionally or inadvertently. The authorities of the party are developing a plan, to be shared with the activists, on what will be done with these votes.
Although the party has not confirmed specific membership sales for each candidate, the electoral roll is expected to exceed 670,000 voting members, more than double what was recorded in the 2020 leadership contest. .