At the start of 2018, everything seemed to be going right for Patrick Brown. Then 39, Brown had risen steadily through Canadian politics: elected to Barrie city council at 22, then to Parliament and, in 2015, to the leadership of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives (PCs). He had won as an outsider, promising a break from a party establishment that had lost four successive elections to the Liberals.

Brown remained relatively unknown after years as a backbencher in Stephen Harper’s government. Then, as Ontario’s PC leader, he had irritated parts of his base by opposing and then backing Premier Kathleen Wynne’s controversial sex-ed curriculum, as well as supporting carbon pricing. But with Wynne deeply unpopular and the PCs comfortably ahead in polls in the winter before the June 2018 election, Brown appeared poised to become premier, bringing him one step closer to a political prize he would later openly pursue: becoming prime minister.

Then, on Jan. 24, CTV News aired an explosive report in which two women accused Brown of sexual misconduct dating back to his time as an MP. One alleged that, when she was a high school student under the drinking age, Brown met her at a bar before taking her to his Barrie home, where he gave her alcohol, exposed himself, and asked her to perform oral sex. Another woman said she was a university student working in Brown’s constituency office when he allegedly sexually assaulted her at a party at his home. Brown vehemently denied the allegations, calling them “categorically untrue.” Brown’s then-girlfriend and future wife, Genevieve Gualtieri, who was 23 at the time, also emphatically defended him, telling the Toronto Star that he was “one of the most respectful, decent and caring individuals I have ever met.” According to The Star, Gualtieri had interned in Brown’s parliamentary office at 21 and later accompanied him on several overseas trips when he was Ontario PC leader.

In the wake of the scandal, several senior staffers urged Brown to resign. In what would become a recurring pattern whenever he faced a crisis, Brown dug in and initially refused to step aside. His senior staffers resigned instead, and under mounting pressure from caucus, Brown relinquished his post hours later. Even then, he refused to disappear. When the PCs scheduled a leadership race to replace him before the election, Brown astonishingly entered it, arguing he had rebuilt the party and deserved to lead it into the campaign. Ten days later, he withdrew, citing the toll on his family and the distraction his candidacy had become for the party.

CTV would later admit that key details provided for its reporting were factually incorrect: the first accuser revised her account to say she was of legal drinking age and had already graduated high school when the alleged incident occurred. Mikaela Patterson, who was dating Brown at the time, and a friend of Brown’s were both at the party where the incident involving the second accuser allegedly took place and disputed core aspects of her claims. Brown later sued CTV for $8 million, a case that ended in 2022 in a settlement that did not include any payment to Brown. (When asked about the settlement, a spokesperson for Brown wrote: “At the time, the Mayor said the statement spoke for itself, explained that the parties would not discuss the settlement’s details, and expressed his desire to move forward.”) But the political damage was already done, seemingly putting an end to Brown’s larger ambitions.

Rather than retreat from public life, he pivoted: on the final day of candidate registration that summer, Brown entered the race for mayor of Brampton, betting that incumbent Linda Jeffrey was vulnerable. He proved himself right, narrowly defeating her by less than four percent of the vote.

Brown has spent the past eight years reinventing himself in municipal politics as mayor of Brampton. But opinions differ on whether that reinvention has been good for the city. After speaking with elected officials, community leaders, and local media, I discovered there are two drastically different versions of Brown, depending on whom you ask.

One version is the dedicated public servant who brought political savvy, an extensive network of national and international contacts, and a sense of urgency to a city hall long seen as dysfunctional. His supporters point to a litany of accomplishments under his watch, including the ongoing $23.8-million revitalization of downtown Brampton and the 2025 opening of the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) School of Medicine, the first new medical school in the GTA in more than a century. In this telling, Brown’s detractors are entrenched elites whose feathers he has ruffled with a no-nonsense, results-driven approach that occasionally collides with bureaucratic process.

Spend enough time in Brampton, though, and another portrait emerges, one some people are reluctant to voice publicly for fear of political or financial retaliation. In this version, Brown is a self-serving bully who treats Brampton as a personal fiefdom, far from the media scrutiny a politician in Queen’s Park or Ottawa would receive. A recent editorial from The Pointer, a local publication often critical of Brown, isn’t subtle in its perspective on the mayor: “Patrick Brown’s record of lies, broken promises and scandals is a disgrace to Brampton.” His critics accuse him of rewarding allies, bending rules to suit his purposes, and presiding over a culture of barely concealed corruption in a city they believe he privately disdains and regards as a political backwater. And, they say, he is only biding his time until another opportunity arises to pursue the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Had the sexual misconduct scandal never erupted, Brown might well have become premier of Ontario rather than mayor of Brampton, putting him on a very different path toward his national political ambitions. In an alternate world, perhaps Brown would be prime minister today rather than Mark Carney.

In this reality, though, Brown doesn’t appear to be lamenting the cruel outcome of what he called the 2018 “attempted political assassination” against him in his memoir, Takedown, published shortly after he became mayor. Instead, he says he is happy to be far from what he describes as the “hornet’s nest” of federal politics, and insists Brampton is now his sole political focus. With no big-name challenger yet appearing close to him ahead of the Oct. 26 municipal election, he looks well-positioned to win a third term, despite growing concerns about his administration’s transparency around conflicts of interest and City spending. So which version of Patrick Brown is closer to the truth: the nefarious opportunist or the devoted public servant? I decided to meet the man to find out.

When I took the GO Train from Toronto to Brampton in late September, I emerged into a downtown in flux. Near city hall, where I was meeting Brown, newer landmarks like the municipally owned, 868-seat Rose Theatre sat alongside non-descript restaurants and dilapidated storefronts for long-shuttered businesses. Construction was everywhere, including hoardings advertising an upcoming “Centre for Innovation,” part of the City’s downtown revitalization plans. Walk a few blocks in almost any direction, though, and the compact core abruptly gives way to the suburban sprawl that defines much of Brampton. As political destinations go, it was a far cry from Queen’s Park or Parliament Hill, seeming less like the seat of power in Ontario’s third-largest city than the civic heart of a quaint rural town.

Greeting me outside his office dressed in a grey suit and red tie, Brown was friendly but not quite warm as we settled in for our interview. Given the bruising media coverage he’s endured through the years, I could understand a certain wariness around journalists. But over the course of our 20-minute conversation, I found him candid in his responses, even when he was careful about how he framed them.

My first question was one he’d surely heard many times before: after the scandal that drove him from the PC leadership, why come to Brampton of all places?

Although Brown grew up in Toronto, his father Edmond practiced law in Brampton. Brown also practiced law in Brampton, he says, after graduating from his father’s alma mater, the University of Windsor, building connections in the city that endured after he entered politics. But he says the strongest pull toward Brampton came from his mentor, the late Bill Davis, Ontario premier from 1971 to 1985 and the local MPP for 26 years.

Nicknamed “Brampton Billy,” Davis had become concerned about allegations of corruption and cronyism at city hall, as well as the political infighting that then-mayor Linda Jeffrey struggled to contain. “Davis was the finest public servant the province has ever seen, and he loved Brampton passionately,” says Brown. “I remember him telling me about how disappointed he was with the leadership in Brampton and the dysfunction.” Aided in part by Davis’s endorsement, Brown won the election and got to work. In his first term, he commissioned KPMG to conduct a third-party value-for-money audit, while launching consultations on Brampton’s first university, the ill-fated BramptonU—a project Brown says came from Davis, who had helped create Ontario’s college system as education minister in the 1960s. Yet before his first term was over, Brown jumped at the opportunity to run for the leadership of the federal Conservatives.

When Conservative MPs removed Erin O’Toole from the leadership in February 2022, an opening presented itself. The early field to replace O’Toole was led by Pierre Poilievre, a long-serving MP then still building a national profile, and Jean Charest, the former federal Progressive Conservative leader and Quebec premier who had been out of elected office for a decade. Brown entered the race in March 2022, days after Charest.

Once again, Brown found himself at a critical juncture. And once again, scandal intervened. That July, roughly two months before election day, the Conservative Party disqualified him over alleged campaign finance violations. At the time, Brown responded to the allegations with one of his own: that the party, and Poilievre’s campaign, conspired against him. “They essentially didn’t want to have me in the race,” he now says. In February 2024, the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections dismissed the allegations after a review. “Elections Canada vindicated me and said there was no wrongdoing,” says Brown.

After being stymied at both the provincial and federal levels, many politicians might have given up on public life altogether. But if Brown’s career has been defined by scandal, it has also been defined by tenacity.

An avid hockey fan and player, he offered me a sports analogy that captures his approach to life. “In a hockey game, if you get body-checked, knocked down, you get back up,” he says. “You let those who instigated those acts win if you give up. Part of resilience is knowing that if you’re doing the right thing, you get back up.”

True to those words, Brown got back up once more after his federal campaign disqualification, declaring that he was putting his national ambitions aside to focus fully on Brampton. He announced his bid for mayor on July 18, two weeks after his disqualification from the CPC race. He then cruised to re-election later that year with just under 60 percent of the vote.

As mayor, Brown has thrown himself into a kind of grassroots community outreach he likely never would have practiced as a federal party leader. He regularly responds to Bramptonians’ invitations, posting on social media about local events, no matter how small, and attending cultural celebrations and sporting events hosted by the city’s Indian, Portuguese, Italian, Nepalese, and other communities. “He understands that a lot of these community groups don’t have access to influence in government, and he offers to be that voice,” says Martin Medeiros, regional councillor for Brampton’s Wards 3 and 4.

Brown also launched the annual Hockey Night in Brampton fundraiser in 2019, which has since raised nearly $80 million for community health care programs, according to an August press release. As part of the fundraiser, Brown has taken the ice alongside hockey legends like Mark Messier and current NHL players such as Morgan Rielly.

According to Medeiros, that relentless, boots-on-the-ground approach, coupled with an accessible, down-to-earth manner, has earned Brown fervent support from many Bramptonians. One of them was Azad Goyat, a real estate sales representative who says he voted for Brown in 2018. “People thought that he is a seasoned politician, and Brampton was always ignored by big politicians,” Goyat told me. Brown had been an MP, a provincial leadership candidate—experience Goyat believed would be an asset for his city. “So we gave him our support.”

But the dysfunction Brown aimed to clean up in 2018 has lingered, some say. Concerns about corruption, conflicts of interest, and governance irregularities have persisted throughout his tenure, largely outside the glare of the national media. And some former supporters, Goyat among them, have come to wonder whether Brown’s formidable work ethic is about serving Brampton, or about serving Patrick Brown himself.

Originally from India, Azad Goyat, 56, settled in Brampton in 2004. During the 2018 election, he urged his community to vote for Brown, seduced by his promises of bringing more business to Brampton, building a cricket stadium, and securing a university and second hospital. A photo Brown posted to X on Oct. 15, 2018, days before he was elected mayor, shows him posing with Goyat at what he captions as a birthday party for Goyat’s daughter, referring to him as “my friend.” Since Brown’s election, though, Goyat has turned sharply against him, saying he has witnessed a mind-boggling succession of local controversies, large and small, accumulate around the mayor.

In 2021, senior City staffer Nikki Kaur alleged that Brown directed her and some of her co-workers to help Peter MacKay’s 2020 Conservative leadership campaign sell memberships. According to the Public Service of Ontario Act, public service employees are prohibited from doing external campaign work during hours for which they are being paid by the City, unless authorized by an ethics executive to campaign on behalf of a candidate in a municipal election, typically during an unpaid leave of absence.

That same year, Brown drew criticism after a slip of the tongue during a virtual scholarship event for Black students, referring to Brampton as “Brown-town” before immediately correcting himself. The term is commonly used as a derogatory reference to the city’s large South Asian population. (“The Mayor’s explanation at the time was that he had a cold and stumbled over the word ‘Brampton,’ which he immediately repeated,” a spokesperson for the mayor wrote in response to a question about the incident.)

The controversies mounted in 2022. Early that year, city council ruptured, splitting almost evenly between Brown’s supporters and opponents. A majority bloc of six councillors, including Medeiros, issued a joint statement accusing Brown of running council in an authoritarian manner and warning that democracy in Brampton was “under siege.” They pointed to what they described as a pattern of blocking votes in closed sessions, and of treating new motions as reconsiderations of earlier decisions. That latter classification required a two-thirds majority rather than a simple majority and, according to the councillors, allowed Brown’s side to prevent their six-member bloc from advancing measures they otherwise had the votes to pass.

Brown sees the controversies swirling around him very differently. The partial audit of the BramptonU project, which city hall promptly halted, revealed procurement irregularities. But Brown views any critique of the project as coming from “people that were always destructive and negative.” And while BramptonU never materialized, Brown argues that the effort helped pave the way for TMU’s School of Medicine.

Nor did several of the major allegations surrounding his administration produce definitive findings of wrongdoing. A 2021 Deloitte investigation into City employee Nikki Kaur’s allegations of administrative misconduct found two instances of non-compliance with City policies but said the majority of her allegations were unsubstantiated. The Pointer later noted that the report authors said their review was incomplete, that a final interview with Kaur was never conducted, and that Deloitte’s investigators allegedly refused to present their report to Brampton’s city council.

According to Global News, Brown’s office defended Brampton’s overseas travel spending, calling the $92,570 Pakistan trip “a success which generated investment leads,” and saying that Brown went to London, but paid for his own hotel and airfare.

To press his case that the accusations against him were baseless, Brown points to the 2022 election. One of the councillors who pushed for investigations into BramptonU lost his seat, while two others didn’t seek re-election—Brown suggests they stayed out because they knew they would lose. Kaur, whose allegations helped ignite scrutiny of his administration, also challenged Brown for mayor and lost decisively. She was fired the day after the election. “I have confidence that voters see through the B.S., and the 2022 election was really a turning point where those that wanted to fight and be destructive were left behind by the voting public,” Brown says.

One of Brown’s council critics was Jeff Bowman, who was named by Brown in our interview as an example of rampant nepotism he encountered at city hall after his arrival, claiming that Bowman had a son who worked for the City. Bowman flatly disputes that. “I can categorically tell you that he is full of crap,” he says during a phone interview, explaining that a City employee happened to share his son’s name but was not related to him.

Bowman remembers the incendiary year of 2022 as emblematic of how Brown wields power at city hall. The vote that ended the BramptonU investigations particularly troubles him. According to Bowman, council was normally split 5–5, meaning any motion to terminate the probes would not have passed. But Bowman says that then-councillor Gurpreet Dhillon, who supported the audit, didn’t attend a snap meeting called by Brown with just 24 hours’ notice, giving Brown the win. “The question is, how did Brown know [Dhillon’s absence] was going to happen, and that he could put his motion forward and win with a five-four vote?” Bowman says.

What happened next disturbed Bowman even more. He says Brown cancelled most of the remaining council meetings before the municipal election, leaving his opponents with few opportunities to continue pressing questions about the abandoned investigations. Bowman believes Brown’s strategy was simply to wait out the election, when several of his fiercest opponents might be gone. “He’s got city hall completely locked down right now,” Bowman says.

When asked for comment on the vote to end the BramptonU investigations, Brown’s team reiterated what he shared with me during our interview, that the “Mayor’s publicly stated position was that the process had become politicized and that the integrity commissioner should determine whether matters warranted investigation.”

But not everyone looks back on that period, or on Brown, the same way. Martin Medeiros was once part of the bloc of councillors that accused him of putting democracy in Brampton “under siege.” His perspective has changed over time. He now believes that while Brown has sometimes pushed against bureaucratic processes, his intention has generally been to move quickly, deliver results, and do what he believes is best for the city, including on projects such as BramptonU.

Medeiros also accepts some responsibility for how poisonous the relationship became during Brown’s first term. Looking back, he says, “I would have handled things very differently.”

“I could have shown more maturity in trying to work with Mayor Brown and my other colleagues,” says Medeiros. Brown could have held a grudge, he says, but instead found ways to “work constructively” with him and also “bring the rest of us together as a cohesive team.”