Patrick Brown’s record of lies, broken promises and scandals is a disgrace to Brampton—10 questions every voter should ask him

Eight years after Patrick Brown’s election as Brampton mayor, the daily assault on the city’s democracy has become impossible to ignore, even for the most preoccupied residents.

Inside City Hall, agendas are empty, council meetings are routinely cancelled or not even scheduled in the first place. 

When they do happen, Brown faces zero opposition, while votes on the most important and often controversial issues fall in line with whatever the mayor tells the other ten councillors to do. 

Multi-million-dollar contracts are handed out without any public process, no staff reports and no council debate. 

Municipal real estate decisions using taxpayer money have no justification and Brampton residents have unwittingly paid tens of millions of dollars more than they should have for secretive deals orchestrated by Brown.

External investigations to probe allegations of widespread City Hall corruption under Brown have been cancelled by the mayor himself.

Employees found guilty of corruption elsewhere have been scooped up by Brown and given senior positions, while others connected to him insulate the mayor from public scrutiny.

Deals are done and votes are taken despite obvious, often alarming conflicts of interest involving Brown and his most loyal council lieutenants.

Claims of cost-savings and freezes are either blatantly false or simply shift expenditures to other budgets that have skyrocketed as property taxpayers struggle to pay the bills.   

Deep cuts to critical budgets for transit and other key city services have been made with no public consultation or council debate.  

Bus riders are now forced to wait for buses that do not arrive, or rumble past stops where students and seniors watch helplessly as the packed vehicles cannot stop. 

Residents lament reductions to snow removal and grass cutting, and the ill effects on their neighbourhoods. Public garbage bins overflow with refuse and parks are checkered with litter.

The downtown core is pocked by construction that has forced businesses to close, while storefronts remain shuttered and buildings are surrounded by fading signs promising redevelopment projects that never arrive.

Students are forced to travel outside the city for post-secondary education after promises of new partnerships with colleges and universities shrivelled up due to Brown’s failed leadership. 

Congestion gets worse by the day. 

The lack of housing needed by Brampton’s residents has created the worst illegal market in the country, putting more families in danger, as details of basement fires and lost lives due to building code violations become part of the city’s typical news cycle.

Targeted shootings of homes, brazen daylight vehicle thefts and threats against members of the city’s large Punjabi-Canadian community have created a permanent chill for thousands of the city’s terrified residents, while Brown, who sits on the police board, remains silent.

When he was elected in 2018, during his inaugural address at the Rose Theatre, Brown stood before many of the people who saved his imploding political career. He had been forced out as leader of the Ontario PC Party after one young woman had accused him of rape and another accused him of attempted rape, while Doug Ford said Brown had the “credibility of a rock” following a series of scandals that marked his time as PC leader. Brown denied the rape and sexual assault allegations, as nomination races for the PC Party had to be redone after he had reportedly ordered staff to make sure his preferred candidates won. 

Reports of inappropriate relationships Brown had with young women throughout his political career and the allegations of rape and attempted rape finally caught up to him.

But Brampton saved him.

He vowed on stage that night in December almost eight years ago that he would repay Brampton, as his opponents wondered how he even ended up in their city. Brown had dodged questions during the mayoral campaign asking him to show evidence that he even lived in Brampton, after it was pointed out that he had no direct connection to the city and appeared to be looking for any place to salvage his sinking career.

“You ever notice during the newscasts during elections, every leader is in Brampton? Brampton visits, Brampton press conferences, Brampton photo-ops,” he said to the Rose Theatre crowd, the chain of office hanging around his neck glittering in the lights…as some wondered if he was talking about himself—Brown bragged in his own political memoir that exploiting immigrant-rich places like Brampton, by lining up large blocs of voters from deep pools of residents that could be easily manipulated by playing identity politics, was his only strategy for electoral success. 

Eight years later, as Brampton voters appear ready to hand him a third mandate, despite Brown’s pathetically comical performance as the mayor who doesn’t actually want to be in the city he’s supposed to govern, here are ten questions residents should ask him.

1. Will you commit to serving a full four-year term with no distractions?

In 2020, when his claims of repaying Brampton were still fresh in the minds of residents, Brown secretly used senior staff inside City Hall to sell memberships for Peter MacKay, who was seeking the federal Conservative Party Leadership. They had served together as MPs under Stephen Harper.

It was widely rumoured that if MacKay eventually became prime minister (Brown has coveted the PM job for himself his entire career) the mayor would be given a ministerial role for helping his old friend.

Then, in 2022, when Brown decided to run for the CPC leadership himself, he refused to step down as mayor and kept getting paid despite travelling back and forth across the country with City Hall staff campaigning to hopefully one day become prime minister. 

A scathing report revealed he was using City Hall staff at his campaign office just outside Brampton, while critical municipal business, such as approving a local share funding commitment for Brampton’s desperately needed second hospital were ignored by the jet-setting politician who had much more important ambitions than worrying about the healthcare of his residents.

Rumours have swirled throughout the current council term that Brown’s frequent trips to Ottawa and other parts of the country were to negotiate an offramp from Brampton, either back to provincial politics or Ottawa, but apparently no avenues opened up, so he decided late in the game to register once again for the Brampton mayor’s job. 

Sources have said he desperately wants a shot at the federal Conservative leadership and if Pierre Poilievre is jettisoned, Brown will drop everything to run again.

2. Will you reopen the forensic investigations into allegations of City Hall corruption that you cancelled?

In 2022, after a majority group of Brampton councillors issued a signed public letter declaring “Democracy is Under Siege” in Brampton due to widespread corruption under Brown, they launched a series of sweeping external forensic investigations to look into contracts awarded to his friends, questionable hiring and other disturbing evidence of wrongdoing inside City Hall directed by Brown and his staff.

Brown then cancelled them months later after a preliminary investigation report connected him to a deeply flawed contract handed to one of the mayor’s closest friends, Rob Godfrey. Brown had called a surprise council meeting when he knew members could not attend and he had enough votes to kill the probes, claiming an internal investigation could be done instead. 

He blatantly lied, telling the public that Ontario’s Ombudsman had said there was no need for the investigations. The Ombudsman wrote two letters, one calling for the investigations and one calling for them to be re-started after Brown cancelled them. Brown has refused to do so.

3. Will you commit to an external audit of the City of Brampton’s purchase of the former Alectra property?

Last year the Toronto Star investigated evidence also received by The Pointer that Brown was involved in the questionable purchase of the former Alectra Utilities building in the city’s west end. The City paid $80 million including fees for a property that had been bought two years earlier for $32 million by a man well known to Brown.

Sources in the city’s real estate industry with close knowledge of the property have told The Pointer that when the City of Brampton paid $80 million, its market value was $29 million.

It remains unclear what it was bought for; Brown claims it was to house staff to process tickets from automated speed enforcement cameras, even though this is not supported by documentation, the speed cameras have been banned and even if staff were needed, less than five percent of the sprawling building that sits on a massive property would have been needed, according to internal City Hall sources.

4. Will you explain why and how millions of dollars of taxpayer money was handed out for community grants and $6 million was provided for a private tennis club dome without any transparency?

Residents have been asking for details of the tennis dome for two years, with very little transparency by Brown, who allegedly uses the private tennis facility.

Questions have also swirled ahead of the election about his use of about $6 million handed to community groups, including arts organizations, with little information about who received the money and why. 

5. Will you be transparent about claims that you are delivering tax freezes?

Brown has repeatedly made claims about delivering tax freezes to Brampton residents, despite taxes consistently going up, largely due to his reckless spending. 

While Brown has made claims of freezing budgets, utility rate increases have skyrocketed; he led an aggressive push to give Peel Police an extra 23.3 percent ($144 million) in 2025, part of the doubling of the police budget in eight years (Brown sits on the Peel Police board); and special levies had to be approved for infrastructure and local share requirements for healthcare investments. 

But Brown repeatedly misleads taxpayers about the reality they face every time they open their bills.

6. Will you open up the books and provide all details about the $11 million Argo transit deal and the $4 billion transit electrification deal?

Brown signed a secretive deal with an unproven company named Argo to provide on-demand bus service to residents. Another $4 billion deal to electrify the city’s bus fleet has also been announced. 

Meanwhile, Brampton Transit has been woefully underfunded since Brown became mayor and in August service cuts began. 

The Pointer has tried for almost two years to get details of the deals, which were made with no public process, no publicly available staff reports and no council debate. 

7. Will you sit down with Punjabi community leaders and answer questions about targeted violence and foreign interference?

Brown has repeatedly throughout his career called Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi his mentor, political hero and “big brother”. He has visited India more than 30 times, often as mayor, even though he tried to deny using his official title. 

After Brown refused to appear for a Parliamentary hearing on foreign interference he was forced by MPs to provide public information, and had to admit that the Indian government had direct influence over his 2022 federal Conservative Party leadership campaign. 

The Indian government has been directly implicated in the plot to assassinate and harass Sikhs in Canada, but Brown, who leads a city with the largest Sikh population outside India (about 200,000 residents), refuses to speak out against the violence his community members have been subjected to and call out his good friend, Narendra Modi.

Brown has admitted Modi and his Hindu nationalist Party, the BJP, were the reason he won the 2015 Ontario Party leadership (watch the video here).

Sikhs in Brampton have been calling for justice, after reports have detailed targeted extortions and violence aimed at the community, while Brown has remained silent about the Indian government’s involvement, and has never raised it as a member of the Peel Police board.

8. Will you commit to economic development instead of false claims of creating an innovation district?

Brown promised in 2018 that bringing jobs to Brampton and protecting existing ones was his priority. He said during his inaugural speech at the Rose Theatre that pressure on the Canadian auto sector at the time “raises concerns about the future of Brampton’s Fiat Chrysler plant”.

He then failed to help save it, as the parent company, Stellantis, recently announced its plans to sell the plant, leaving 3,000 workers out of a job, while thousands of others including family members and intertwined autosector workers are now left wondering what the future holds. 

Sources directly involved with efforts to save the Chrysler plant expressed their frustration to The Pointer over Patrick Brown’s apathy and absence from the entire process to find alternative solutions, while his empty words were not followed by any action. 

Brown has for years also claimed massive investments in the downtown “Innovation District” which does not exist beyond his repeated marketing of a project that has no traces of actually taking shape.  

9. Will you stop dividing Brampton’s ethnic and religious communities?

Brown has admitted this is his strategy. Groups in the city have denounced his tactics, including his inflaming of old-world tensions for political gain, for example, when City Hall was used for an ugly display of intolerance toward the proposed construction of a new Mosque in Brampton.

Brown did the same when tensions flared between Hindu and Sikh residents in the city, as residents look to leadership for connections and bridge building, not division and conflict.

10. Will you allow an external review of current senior employees and other key hirings under your leadership?

Immediately after getting elected in 2018 Brown hired senior staff from Niagara Region directly implicated in a massive corruption scandal labelled an “Inside Job” by the Ontario Ombudsman’s investigation. Brown has repeatedly lied, claiming the staff he hired were not implicated in the scathing investigation. 

Jason Tamming still holds a senior position with the City and other questionable hiring decisions have been made under Brown. Meanwhile key senior staff have been let go or they have left.

Sources have told The Pointer the decisions have caused the municipal corporation deep reputational damage that has widespread implications for the City and its residents. 

Brown also hired an inexperienced integrity commissioner with connections to him who has since been embroiled in controversy at City Hall, including a lawsuit she threatened against council members who fired her, before Brown had her rehired this term.

The municipal election is Monday, October 26.

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