BARRIE, ONT.—Who is Patrick Walter Brown?

For the stalwarts in the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, he’s a little-known upstart, a federal Conservative MP from Barrie who has the temerity to think he can lead the provincial party.

But to friends and acolytes, the 36-year-old is a fanatic for hockey, running and politics with the energy and ego of 10 men. He sees himself as part of the next generation that will bring the Ontario PC Party back from the brink. He’s a little guy with a lot to prove.

Those who like him and those who don’t agree on one thing: when he sets his mind to something, the teetotalling bachelor sets to achieve it with hard work, organizational skills and dogged determination.

But the nagging question for many is whether Brown has the experience, the political gravitas, to lead a party that was trounced in last year’s provincial election after then leader Tim Hudak took a hard right turn and threatened to fire 100,000 public servants.

“I don’t know if he’s really ready yet for this kind of job,” Barrie resident John Fisher told the Star.

However, like many others, Fisher, whose family-run barbershop has been on Dunlop St. E. for 60 years, is impressed by Brown’s enthusiasm.

Brown says he’s a red Tory, but others fear that masks his social conservative views, including his staunch opposition to abortion.

“Patrick is whatever you want him to be,” said a former Tory operative familiar with Brown’s efforts to win over many segments of society, especially multicultural communities.

Brown, born and raised in Toronto, has been involved in Conservative politics since his days as a teenage student at St. Michael’s College School, a respected private Catholic school. Even then, he was planning a career in politics, say others who shared his political passion.

During his second year of law school, he was one of 10 finalists in the national “As Prime Minister” essay contest sponsored by Magna International, where he later worked in the legal department for four years.

Brown, who has two sisters, was weaned on politics. Between his father, Edmond, now a Brampton lawyer and a former NDP candidate, and his mother, Judy, who hails from Conservative stock in Barrie, the breakfast table conversation often drifted to politics and current events.

“My father ran for the NDP twice, 1979 and 1980, in the riding Davenport . . . and I sort of got an interest in politics,” Brown said. “And he would always encourage me to read the newspaper, so when I was a kid at the breakfast table he would be reading the newspaper and I would be reading the newspaper. My mother, being a teacher, very much encouraged reading current events,” he said.

It was after watching Jean Charest, former federal Progressive Conservative party cabinet minister and Quebec premier, speak passionately at the 1993 federal Tory convention about how he was going to fight the separatist threat, that a light went off in Brown’s head.

“I remember telling my parents, ‘I think I’m a Conservative. I really believe in this guy.’ Not exactly a popular time to become a Conservative,” he said, referring to the almost total collapse of the party when it was left with only two seats in the Commons. Charest would later become a mentor to Brown and recently held a fundraiser for him.

Brown was 22, still doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, when he ran for Barrie city council, knocking off an incumbent. He continued as a city councillor even when he went to law school at the University of Windsor. He flew back and forth from Windsor to Barrie to attend council meetings.

Not long after getting his law degree and briefly setting up a practice in Barrie, he set his sights on toppling Barrie Liberal MP Aileen Carroll in 2004. It didn’t happen. Undeterred, he tried again two years later and was successful.

While Brown hasn’t left much of imprint on the federal scene in Ottawa, he is virtually a household name in Barrie.

Brown’s family roots run deep in Barrie on his mother’s side. His grandfather Joe Tascona first ran a Cadillac dealership and later sold used cars: Honest Joe’s.

Brown worked one summer each with former Tory MPPs, including Isabel Bassett, Bob Wood, and Gary Fox and three years with Toni Skarica.

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It’s for that reason veteran Ontario Tories were taken aback when Brown joined four incumbent MPPs — Christine Elliott, Vic Fedeli, Monte McNaughton and Lisa MacLeod — vying to replace Hudak. Fedeli and MacLeod have since left the race.

“Who does he think he is?” was the common refrain around Queen’s Park, with some Tory MPPs privately predicting a win by Brown would trigger a membership exodus and the ultimate demise of the party that governed Ontario for 50 of the past 75 years, but lost the past four elections.

But Brown’s unquestioned success in signing up new members for the almost moribund party — his campaign claims it signed up 41,000 people — has made the establishment take notice.

Federal caucus colleague Tony Clement, the president of the Treasury Board and a former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister at Queen’s Park, says Brown, although understated in Ottawa, is the real deal.

“The key question to me is not whether you have it going in, it’s whether you can acquire it as you take on the mantle of leadership and have to make difficult but necessary decisions, both as party leader and, if things go your way, then as premier. It is almost irrelevant whether he’s seen as having gravitas now,” Clement said.

Barrie entrepreneur Jamie Massie, president of Georgian International Corp., said his good friend Brown has “a great vision for Ontario . . . and is the renewal the party needs.”

“He wants to build a better Ontario and I think he has the tool box to be able to do it,” Massie said. “His politics are the same as his hockey. He works really hard. Anybody who plays hockey against him will tell you the same thing. He outworks you.”

Chief among Brown’s critics is Jack Garner, 80, the patriarch of Progressive Conservatives in Barrie, who says the young MP is admittedly “hard to get a read on.”

“In my opinion, everything that Patrick does he does for his own benefit,” said Garner, whose involvement with the PC party dates back to John Robarts in the 1960s.

Brown’s love affair with politics has been to the exclusion of almost everything else, including having a family of his own.

“My (101-year-old) grandmother and mother remind me of that daily. They want grandkids,” he said.

“One of the consequences of serving my community so actively is that I haven’t had much time for that . . . but I certainly do hope to have a family one day.”

Correction - March 17, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said MP Patrick Brown did a brief internship in the mid-1990s in the office of his uncle, Joe Tascona, then the Tory MPP for Barrie-Simcoe-Bradford.

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