Let’s stipulate off the top that media make mistakes every single day of the year. There is no such thing as a perfect edition of any newspaper or television program. I’m sure I make mistakes in every single episode of The Agenda. Luckily, we have many loyal viewers who point them out whenever they happen.
CTV may consider itself fortunate that it’s settled its lawsuit with Patrick Brown without the $8 million the mayor of Brampton was seeking in damages changing hands. But the settlement also lays bare the reality, four years later, that CTV has finally had to do a mea culpa for a consequential and egregious mistake.
Frankly, its mistakes likely cost Brown the chance to be premier of Ontario and set in motion a chain reaction of events that allowed Doug Ford to become premier instead. (The author's wife, Francesca Grosso, was a health-policy adviser to Brown during his tenure as Progressive Conservative leader. She was co-chair of the Progressive Conservative Health Policy Platform in 2017 and also assisted Brown with his 2018 memoir.)
Let’s go back to January 2018. CTV thought it had a barnburner of a scoop: the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition at Queen’s Park accused of sexual misconduct in an era of #MeToo.
There was only one problem with the story — key “facts” turned out to be wrong. And not insignificant details either. When you’re accused of making inappropriate sexual advances to a high-school student under the legal drinking age and the person turns out to be older — well, that’s a pretty significant “fact” to get wrong.
“CTV National News regrets including those details in the story and any harm this may have caused to Mr. Brown,” the network’s statement reads.
Any harm this may have caused? May have caused? CTV’s story led to Brown’s ouster as Progressive Conservative party leader. It almost certainly cost him the premiership, although one can never know. The PCs under Brown were polling well, even in northern Ontario, which is normally a wasteland for Tories. Brown might have been on his way to a massive majority government.
It's true that Brown might have ended up running the worst campaign ever. The Liberals might have come back to life. The NDP might have self-destructed. It’s all speculation.
But here’s what we do know: Ford ran a pretty bad campaign, had personal-popularity numbers that were underwater throughout the campaign, and still won a majority government because people were desperate to get rid of the Liberals and weren’t prepared to put the NDP in power. Those dynamics would have existed had Brown been the leader, and my guess is he’d have benefitted from all of them, just as Ford did.
For Brown, CTV’s allegation was the straw that broke the camel’s back. His caucus had a teleconference shortly after the story went public, and to a person, they felt the accusation was a bridge too far to come back from. While there was no technical mechanism for the caucus to get rid of the leader, they insisted he resign. Frankly, Brown was a 39-year-old rookie leader and in over his head: few caucus members had supported him in his run for leader. Remember, he was an MP who’d gravitated to Queen’s Park and won the leadership because of his extraordinary ability to sign up new members and get them out to vote. His challenger Christine Elliott — the current health minister — had the lion’s share of caucus support. Yet when the numbers were added up, she didn’t come close.
Brown’s political career has been one of the most unusual in Ontario history. He was pretty much invisible as a Stephen Harper backbencher in Ottawa: never in cabinet, never a parliamentary secretary, never a committee chair. At that time, I remember sitting across the aisle from him on a flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Having recognized me, he started chatting me up. I had no idea who he was, even though he was an MP from an hour up Highway 400 in Barrie.
But his organizational skills and his Ontario-leadership win got people to notice that he did have something going for him. Still, he wasn’t comfortable enough in his own skin. On that night in January 2018, he wasn’t on firm enough ground with his own caucus to stare them down and say, “This is all bunk. I’m going to fight it. And, besides, you can’t get rid of me anyway.” Six months later, he’d almost certainly have been premier. Instead, Ontarians got two years of circus-like antics under Ford, who didn’t discover how to act like a premier until he’d fired his first chief of staff and found some mature leadership chops during the pandemic.
Despite having been hit by all this, Brown somehow resurrected his career, successfully running for mayor of Brampton later in 2018. He’d originally tried to run for chair of Peel Region, but Ford nixed that as well when he introduced legislation to prevent the role from being selected by the public and instead gave the job to Peel council. Brown pivoted, ran for Brampton mayor, and beat an incumbent.
To be sure, Brown wanted this statement from CTV now, so he could clear the decks to run for federal Conservative leader — he announced Sunday in Brampton that he intended to do so. That would have been almost impossible to do with these allegations hanging over his head. He might have been able to extract more from CTV had his political clock not been ticking so loudly. But if he can sign up tens of thousands of new members — as he did on the road to winning the Ontario PC leadership — he could see a potential path to victory in the CPC leadership race or at least have an opportunity to help his boyhood political hero, Jean Charest, win.
Brown has demonstrated a kind of resilience not often seen in Canadian public life. Enormous credit goes to Genevieve Gualtieri, now his wife, who stuck by him when numerous other “friends” abandoned ship.
Brown could have — almost certainly would have — been premier of Ontario if not for an egregious journalistic mistake. Regrets are all well and good, and I’ve expressed my share of them. But the consequences of this screw-up have been unlike anything Ontario has ever seen before.
Full disclosure: A previous version of this article neglected to indicate that the author's wife, Francesca Grosso, was a health-policy adviser to Patrick Brown during his tenure as Progressive Conservative leader. She was co-chair of the Progressive Conservative Health Policy Platform in 2017 and also assisted Brown with his 2018 memoir.