Barrie MP Patrick Brown is claiming he has sold the most party memberships in the race to replace ousted Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak.

Brown, a nine-year veteran of the House of Commons and the only candidate without a seat in the provincial legislature, said Saturday night that his campaign brought 40,410 new members into the struggling party.

‎MPP Christine Elliott’s campaign did not report a number but a party source put it at 13,000. Her camp, said the source, is “going to look at Brown’s release and say, ‘We can’t let it be seen he’s sold three times as many memberships.’ ”

Trailing is MPP Monte McNaughton. His campaign reported about 20,000 memberships sold, but the party source said the actual number is closer to 5,700.

Mike Ras, a spokesman for Elliott, said her campaign will wait until Tuesday to reveal a number because they want to verify it against official party tallies.

Other sources told the Star that some camps have wildly inflated their numbers.

“It’s been an incredible journey so far, and it’s not over yet,” Brown said in a statement, noting he needs to make sure the people who did buy memberships vote for him at party polls in the first week of May.

Rival camps cautioned that under the party’s voting system a candidate’s votes must be spread out in all 107 ridings across the province and simply to have‎ sold the most memberships does not guarantee victory.

Elliott boasted in a statement she has the support of 17 of the party’s 28 MPPS and 25 Ontario MPs — ‎including eight cabinet ministers — who sit with Brown in the Commons and are not backing him.

“I have raised and reported twice the amount of money than any other candidate,” she said.

“The work does not stop here.”

In total, the party, which has lost the last four elections to the Liberals, now appears to have about 70,000 members, up from 10,000 when the race began in earnest last fall.

Numbers provided by campaigns after Saturday’s 5 p.m. membership deadline have not yet been verified by the central party, which will spend the next week or so cross-referencing the lists to check for duplicates. An official tally will be made public in coming days.

But with McNaughton, 37, seemingly in the rear, the race is down to competing visions between the centrist Elliott, the 59-year-old MPP for Whitby-Oshawa who is seen as‎ the establishment standard-bearer, and the right-leaning Brown, 36, a self-styled insurgent.

Elliot — the third-place finisher in the 2009 PC leadership behind eventual ‎winner Hudak and runner-up Frank Klees — has promised to build a “big blue tent” to woo Liberal and NDP voters into the fold.

Her late husband, former federal and provincial finance minister Jim‎ Flaherty, twice finished second in the Tory leadership: to Ernie Eves in 2002 and to John Tory in 2004.

Elliott also enjoys the backing of former premier Bill Davis and federal luminaries John Baird and Lisa Raitt.

Brown, by contrast, ‎has been campaigning against the old guard, which has lost four straight elections to the Liberals, most recently to Premier Kathleen Wynne last June.

“Our party needs a reset,” Brown said in the statement.

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Taking a leaf from the federal Conservatives, he has been making inroads in GTA cultural communities and appealing to new Canadians to join the provincial Tories. He has also attracted some celebrity endorsements from the sports world, including hockey legend Wayne Gretzky.

McNaughton, for his part, has been trying to appeal to social conservatives by opposing the Liberals’ new sex-education curriculum. At the same time, he has touted the shout-out he got from controversial former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, whose crack smoking last year made international headlines.

The full-time successor to Hudak, who was widely blamed for last June’s election loss over his promise to cut 100,000 public sector jobs, will be selected through a one-member-one-vote preferential ballot. The winner will be announced at the PC convention in Toronto on May 9.

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