Brown, the mayor of Brampton, Ont., dropped out of the leadership race on Tuesday. Debbie Jodoin, a former district organizer for the Brown campaign, said Thursday night in a media statement through her attorney that Brown arranged to work on his campaign through a third-party firm. In a message to Conservative members on Friday morning, LEOC chairman Ian Brodie revealed details of the party’s communication with the Brown campaign after the committee received information last week that the campaign was allegedly breaking federal election laws. “Along with our party attorney, I have been personally committed for most of the week to finding a way to bring Patrick Brown’s campaign into compliance with our rules and federal law,” Brody said in the email.
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Brody said he and a lawyer met with Brown campaign officials on June 29 to talk to them about the allegations and that the party would demand a response to them. He said the party sent a letter to the Brown campaign the next day demanding a response to the allegations. The Brown campaign responded on July 1, but the response “did not address our concerns about the violations,” Brodie’s email states. The two sides communicated until July 5, when the LEOC decided to disqualify Brown by an 11-6 vote, the email states. “In the spirit of good faith and fairness, the party gave them every opportunity to clarify and resolve their concerns aside. Ultimately that effort failed,” Brody said. “To be clear, the Brown campaign knew full well what the charges were. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply false.” Brown and his campaign claimed the party failed to adequately inform them of the allegations. In a statement Thursday night, a Brown campaign spokesman said the party failed to act fairly and transparently in dealing with the allegations and that Brown’s alleged disqualification was the result of an effort to reduce the number of candidates. “The goal was to exclude Patrick Brown from the leadership race and narrow the field,” the statement said.
Brown has offered to reimburse the company, the campaign says
Brodie’s message came after Jodoin released a statement through her attorneys Thursday evening identifying herself as the whistleblower in the Brown campaign. Jodoin said she personally discussed with Brown an agreement to be paid by a private company and that he approved. “Mr. Brown told me that it was permissible for me to work for a company as a consultant and then have the company volunteer for the campaign,” Jodoin’s statement said. “He connected me via text message to a third party for this purpose. I trusted him, but as time went on I became more involved with the deal and suspected it was not okay.” Brown’s campaign still claims the party did not provide full details of the allegation. Brown’s campaign claims that, prior to his suspension, he had identified Jodoin to the committee as a possible source of the allegations, and that the committee never responded. A letter Brown’s campaign sent to the LEOC about Jodoin says she had approached Brown about working on his campaign. The letter says Brown referred her to his friend for work, but that Brown assumed volunteer work for his campaign would not be done on company time. Brown’s campaign offered to reimburse the company that had paid Jodoin, according to the letter.
The enforcement agency investigates complaints
The Elections Commissioner of Canada, the office responsible for enforcing and complying with the Canada Elections Act, confirmed Thursday that it has received information about alleged violations of the law by the Brown campaign. Liberal MP Adam van Koeverden asked election officials to look into whether the Conservative Party benefited from alleged wrongdoing by the Brown campaign. Brody said Brown could not continue to run given the seriousness and credibility of the allegations. “LEOC could not afford to risk having a leadership candidate under investigation by Elections Canada for violating federal law — especially one who did not answer the questions we asked to bring him into compliance,” Brodie said. Brodie said he would like to share all the information the party has on the matter with members but, for legal reasons, he cannot at this time. Five candidates remain in the race for the Conservative leadership. The party will announce the new leader in September. Have questions about this story? We answer as many as we can in the comments.
