It is no secret that Patrick Brown and the ruling Ontario Progressive Conservative Party aren’t BFFs.Brown, newly elected as Brampton’s mayor, was the party’s leader before stepping down at the end of January amid sexual misconduct allegations from a pair of women. He has denied those allegations and is suing CTV News for defamation over its initial reporting on the story.He was later booted from the PC caucus, essentially ending all affiliations with the party he led only weeks before, and replaced by Doug Ford, who is now premier.“I never got along with the hard-right in my own party. I took positions that you didn’t expect from Progressive Conservatives,” Brown told the Brampton Guardian, listing his participation in Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade, support for climate change action and stance against Islamophobia as driving factors in the falling out.“That certainly made some enemies within the party, but I felt that I was doing what was right for Canada and for Ontario,” he added.Since then, Brown first attempted a political comeback in the race to become the first elected Peel Region chair. That attempt was squashed by the Ford government at the end of July after it cancelled the planned regional chair elections in Peel, York and Muskoka regions just a day before municipal election nominations were set to close.The next day, Brown registered in the Brampton mayor’s race.Rumours of a rift between him and his former party gained traction on the campaign trail after Ford’s campaign manager, Michael Diamond, and two former PC Party presidents endorsed and held a fundraiser for incumbent mayor Linda Jeffrey at the uber-conservative Toronto Albany Club in September.Jeffrey was a longtime political opponent of the PC Party while serving as a Brampton MPP in Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal governments.Brown ended up defeating Jeffrey in the Oct. 22 municipal election to become the city ...
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