The RCMP should investigate Patrick Brown’s ties to India and China
When Patrick Brown handcuffed himself to the Ontario PC Party in 2015, manipulating the faulty math conventionally used to elect its leader, there was no escape from the scandals that have followed the ambitious Canadian politician through all three levels of government.
His testimony before Parliamentarians Thursday, admitting to being cowed by a foreign government he willingly offered himself to for years, added a new dimension to the depths Brown’s scandals have plunged us into.
He remains accused of acquaintance rape.
Another young woman accused him of sexual assault while trying to rape her.
A leaked email ahead of Ontario’s 2018 election—Brown was eventually excommunicated by the Party following the rape and sexual assault accusations—showed he demanded his team get him the “result I want” in what was supposed to be a democratically run riding nomination race during a campaign he never got to finish. A half-dozen results under Brown’s leadership were overturned when he was jettisoned after allegations of ballot-box stuffing, ineligible voters and fake memberships (senior PC officials described his scandalous leadership as a “debacle” that threatened to derail the entire Party).
Brown has denied all these allegations. Many others have piled up month by month.
Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner ruled when Brown broke provincial law four times related to sources of income while PC Party leader, including a $375,000 loan Brown took from a man who was handed a nomination to run in the election, that the politician’s “non-disclosure was deliberate”. He lied.
In Brampton, the list of Brown’s scandals is far too long to detail here, but these are some highlights that are important, to understand the context of the man now revealed to be a serious threat to our national security: he handed more than half-a-million dollars—three times more than what had been approved for one of Brown’s questionable projects which never saw the light of day—to one of his closest friends for work he was entirely unqualified to do (hardly any of it was ever done and council was never informed the man was one of the mayor’s closest friends); staff were quietly directed to hand another contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to another close associate of Brown who had never done any work in the area of his latest mystery project, and didn’t even have a registered company when he was contacted behind the scenes by City Hall; he secretly directed senior staff to sell memberships for Peter MacKay during work hours and used City Hall to promote Brown’s former federal Conservative colleague in the 2020 CPC leadership race; Brown then cancelled half-a-dozen external investigations into his conduct called by a majority group of councillors who issued a public letter with a heading that declared Brampton’s “democracy is under siege” (he took advantage of a councillor’s absence during a late August meeting in 2022 when he himself voted to cancel the investigations after registering as a candidate for mayor following his disqualification from the CPC race); the man he hired to run communications at City Hall had just been singled out by Ontario’s Ombudsman for corruption in Niagara Region; the man hired as CAO by Brown in 2019 tried to break provincial laws by pulling independent oversight functions at City Hall under his authority; Brown was caught opening up a City-owned hockey arena during the pandemic lockdown so he and his buddies could play weekly pick-up games while children sat at home; he was caught using City staff for his 2022 Conservative Party of Canada leadership race; during that race, when he was criss-crossing the country campaigning around the clock while refusing to take a leave from his fully-paid mayor’s role, Brown allegedly violated federal election finance rules and was disqualified by the Party (he denies this; the matter is still being investigated by federal authorities).
Brown’s burning desire is to become Canada’s prime minister. He has dreamed about it since he was a teenager.
His abandonment by the PCs made him fear being knocked forever into political irrelevance and Brampton was the last choice for salvation from permanent punishment (when his political fortunes were sunk by the PCs he initially explored a mayoral race in Mississauga but calculated Bonnie Crombie would be harder to defeat than Linda Jeffrey in Brampton). He tried to get out of the city in 2020 and 2022 by moving back into federal politics, but failed miserably, then ran again for mayor.
His exploits in Brampton, or even as Ontario’s PC leader, might be discarded as little more than the scandals of an uninspiring leader whose singular ability is his deceitful enthusiasm for exploiting diaspora communities across the country, to gin up his otherwise hopeless chances of winning a major election.
What we learned Thursday should bury the apathy many treat him with.
After more than a decade of being groomed by Indian officials, primarily Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brown was finally forced to testify before Parliament.
He was asked about the foreign influence exerted on him.
He had for years quietly leveraged his relationships with Indian officials to win over hugely influential voting blocs here in Canada. It became his central obsession, perhaps planted by well trained Indian operatives, part of his stated strategy to exploit diaspora groups who would carry him from political obscurity to the pinnacle of Conservative leadership in this country.
The Standing committee that has been investigating India’s role in manipulating Canadian politicians had politely requested Brown’s cooperation, voluntarily, two months ago. He refused. Then he went silent as the committee pressed him to explain himself amid concerns over his close ties to the largest country in the world, which aspires to become a major geopolitical player.
Finally, the committee forced him to testify, hanging a summons around the neck of the Brampton mayor.
What we learned last week when he was dragged before MPs was disturbing, but not surprising to anyone familiar with Brown’s India connections going back to his days as a backbench MP desperate to climb up the Conservative Party ladder.
He describes in his tell-all book, Takedown—Brown’s grievance-filled 2018 exposé (which naively reveals more about his shocking political behaviour during his rise to infamy than his many enemies along the way)—a reckless ambition to become relevant.
Modi gave the Barrie-area MP “state status”, Brown wrote; invited him to lunch with Indian billionaires and bollywood celebrities; gave him a security detail while in India that included men with “machine guns” and vans filled with staff, all to fete a politician from small town Ontario.
In his own writing, Brown exposes his dangerously comical cluelessness. He thought Modi saw him as a “brother” and apparently failed to understand why he would be given free trips to the country when his own government refused to fund them anymore—Stephen Harper’s regime had put the problematic backbencher on its travel ban due to previous unauthorized visits to India.
He bragged about carrying a “big stick” in India, oblivious to the fact he was, and remains a nobody there, a convenient political stooge to be used by Modi and his BJP government in Canada, where the large Indian diaspora community often poses problems to a regime in New Delhi whose domestic and foreign policy promotes Hindu-Nationalism and rejects the pluralism that defines modern Canada.
As reported skillfully by The Pointer’s Muhammad Hamza, Brown’s testimony Thursday was a bookend to the alarming decade-long exploitation Brown opened himself up to, described in detail in his own tell-all memoir.
Brown admitted under sustained questioning by Liberal MP Jennifer O’Connell that the Indian government directed him about language that was not to be used during the 2022 CPC leadership race. He took the direction and followed it.
As unsettling as the information was, it opens up many more questions about Brown and the very real foreign risks his behaviour has created for Canada.
How do we know what else Brown might have done over the years to advance the interests of Modi’s government? Have Canadian security and our economic interests been put at risk due to other pressure India has exerted on Brown?
And what about China?
We know during the 2022 CPC leadership race he also met with groups in B.C. that have direct ties to Beijing. He then won the endorsement of the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association after Brown vowed to soften the stance, if elected, on China, despite widespread human rights violations and an increasingly aggressive political and economic posture toward Canada.
So why, some of you might be thinking, don’t we know more about Patrick Brown, the mayor of that city above Toronto who seems to spend an inordinate amount of the day swallowing up screen time given freely by traditional media?
The short answer: because not many people care about an ineffectual mayor who occasionally pops up in headlines either for his latest low-level scandal or to fill media space as a talking head on topics irrelevant to his actual job.
The Pointer often hears from readers frustrated by the naive coverage of Brown on larger media platforms, and many allege a political motive.
Brown and Pierre Poilievre don’t like each other, and many feel left-leaning media view Brown as a convenient foil (as flawed as he may be) to a much scarier man.
This would be a dangerous game.
Politicians like Brown who escape responsible, fact-based reporting can easily sneak up and become a significant threat to public interests.
Media hubris is partly at fault.
Outlets out of their depth that rush forward when news they deem worthy enough for their coverage unfolds, often remain silent when holes are blasted through reporting that was manipulated and devoid of crucial background.
Poor coverage by journalists unfamiliar with the politicians and ground they are suddenly told to report on, often does more harm.
Brown is all-too aware of this. He deploys more staff from City Hall (paid for by Brampton taxpayers) to manipulate media every single day than most premiers—usually to spin narratives or opine on issues to make Brown look like a national politician, with little connection to his jurisdiction as mayor of Brampton.
Other forms of media manipulation, often by his surrogates, are used to defend him from scandal.
A story that suddenly popped up in mainstream media outlets right before his testimony on Thursday should have been easily challenged by experienced journalists.
The CBC unwittingly promoted spin from Jaskaran Sandhu, a known Brown supporter—who even served as one of his campaign managers in 2022—using unnamed supporters of the former candidate, claiming he was the victim of Indian interference during the race. They have tried to shift attention away from Brown, with Sandhu, who has been a regular talking head on CBC news shows (but was not named in the story last week) spinning a narrative since 2023 that Poilievre was the candidate who was helped by New Delhi in 2022.
The feeding of information to a reporter unfamiliar with Brown, the timing and the counter-narrative of Poilievre masked the evidence that was about to be revealed thanks to O’Connell’s skillful provocation.
Brown’s purpose Thursday was clearly to suggest he is no friend of Modi.
The ruse collapsed, quickly.
The problem with his victim story is that it made little sense, and O’Connell carefully drilled down and laid this out.
“Do you think it’s appropriate for a foreign government to send a message to a sitting MP (Brown’s campaign co-chair Michelle Rempel Garner), that you should be changing the language because it’s not welcomed by that foreign nation? Do you think that’s an appropriate election activity by a foreign government, and do you regret” doing what the Indian government told you to do? “Do you think that’s acceptable in a Canadian election?... I think that constitutes foreign interference pretty clearly.”
It was Brown, not Poilievre or any of the other candidates, who was directed by the Indian government. And it was Brown, not Poilievre or any of the other candidates, who did what New Delhi told him to do, when he changed the language he used in front of Sikh audiences during the campaign.
He chose to align himself with the Indian government’s very specific interest in the words Brown was using when he spoke inside Gurdwaras across Canada in 2022.
As our national intelligence experts have explained to Parliamentarians investigating recent foreign interference, this is what hostile governments do through compromised Canadian politicians used by those governments because they know they have control over them.
This is why Brown did what he was told by Indian officials.
This was missing from some news stories that reported on Brown’s testimony.
Media that report on the Brampton mayor need to do a better job.
More importantly, Canadian authorities must take a hard look at his ties to India and China.
Brown has even bragged that the “Overseas” branch of Modi’s BJP helped sign up members for him during the 2015 Ontario PC leadership race, crediting the effort as the reason for his surprise victory.
He also thanked Modi in 2015 personally, travelling to India in the middle of the campaign, for the establishment of an Indian group formed to help him win the Ontario PC race. Who paid for these activities?
What other leverage might India have over Brown? Is there compromising information or other evidence being used against him by foreign actors?
The acknowledgement of sustained Indian coercion Brown admitted to while being examined Thursday and foreign financial support he himself has described, such as payments for flights to help him establish networks of support in India, need to be investigated.
There is scant information about his activities, connections and financial dealings in India.
The RCMP should also probe why Brown has visited the country more than two-dozen times, and continues to go there as a mayor. Why would a municipal politician spend so much time in an official capacity travelling to a country on the other side of the world?
What we do know, largely thanks to Jennifer O’Connell who took her duty to protect the public interest seriously, is that Brown is willing to do what New Delhi tells him, after years of accepting favours from Modi and his networks.
We all should be very concerned about this.
The Pointer will continue investigating and reporting on the controversial mayor. Authorities responsible for safeguarding our national security should do the same.
At a time when vital public information is needed by everyone, The Pointer has taken down our paywall on all stories to ensure every resident of Brampton, Mississauga and Niagara has access to the facts. For those who are able, we encourage you to consider a subscription. This will help us report on important public interest issues the community needs to know about now more than ever. You can register for a 30-day free trial HERE. Thereafter, The Pointer will charge $10 a month and you can cancel any time right on the website. Thank you
Submit a correction about this story
