TORONTO

Suddenly the snooze-fest that was the PC leadership campaign has caught fire.

Official numbers haven’t been released, but indications are Barrie MP Patrick Brown — an outsider and a relatively unknown quantity at Queen’s Park — has a jaw-dropping lead.

Party insiders say he has signed up “more than 40,000 and less than 41,000” new members.

That’s an astonishing achievement when you consider PC membership had dwindled to around 10,000 before the leadership campaign started.

Whitby-Oshawa MPP Christine Elliott wooed around 14,000 new members, while Monte McNaughton, the MPP from Lambton-Kent-Middlesex, is expected to have about 8,000 new members when numbers are tallied later this week.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a slam-dunk for Brown. He still has to get his voters out in May, and insiders say that will be difficult.

But it does sound alarms for Elliott, considered the front-runner when the campaign started.

She’s expected to pick up the majority of the 10,000 existing members. There’s also a large number of members who are neutral right now. She’ll have to woo those onside. While her numbers seem low compared to Brown’s, Elliott doubled the number she signed when she ran against Tim Hudak for the leadership in 2009.

The party is delighted with the numbers. An influx of 60,000 new members at a time when everyone was writing off the party as irrelevant is seen as a hopeful sign.

“It far exceeded expectations and we’re over the moon,” said Richard Ciano, president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

Elliott said Monday her numbers are solid. She’s building a “big blue tent” that embraces “fiscal conservatism and social compassion.

“I’m very confident in my numbers and I’m not going to engage in that chest-thumping bravado that the other two candidates are getting into,” she told reporters.

“I want to talk about what’s real. My numbers are real and I’m very confident in them.”

McNaughton was missing in action — as was Rick Nicholls from Chatham-Kent-Essex.

While both interim leader Jim Wilson and Tory House leader Steve Clark denied having told the pair to stay home after their disastrous performance last week, I’ve been told that other Tory MPPs are so angry with them, they told them to disappear.

Tories are angry with McNaughton for suggesting Premier Kathleen Wynne had no authority to impose the sex-ed curriculum — leading to accusations he’s homophobic. Nicholls said last week he didn’t believe in evolution and said it would not be a bad idea for kids to be exempt from classes that taught it.

That walked into a Liberal trap. Not only did it get Wynne and the Liberals out from under the grill over allegations of bribery in the Sudbury byelection, it damaged the PCs at a time when they’re trying to rebrand themselves as a progressive, modern party of fiscal conservatives.

Neither Nicholls nor McNaughton returned my calls. I’ve been told McNaughton is off for a week and Nicholls will be back Tuesday.

Brown is considered a social conservative, although the only evidence I’ve seen for that so far is that he voted in favour of a private member’s bill to create a special committee to examine the legal definition of when a fetus becomes a human being. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had asked his caucus not to support the bill.

A lawyer, he’s fluent in French — a huge asset for a party that traditionally has problems engaging the francophone community. While he managed to snag an endorsement from Wayne Gretzky, the majority of his support has come from ethnic communities. Brown has made a point of engaging communities such as Sikhs and Tamils where PC support is thin on the ground.

As chair of the GTA caucus, he has huge support from Conservatives in Ottawa.

The convention is May 9.

Suddenly it’s a race — and anyone can win.

christina.blizzard@sunmedia.ca