On June 3, 2017, Brown first deployed this rule change when he personally intervened in a meeting of the PC Party executive and decreed that he would be appointing a minimum of 64 candidates. Dykstra collaborated with Brown by then using Brown’s proclamation as the basis for rendering moot another constitutional requirement – that the PC Party executive consider all outstanding nomination appeals (Article 27.6), including those with evidence of ballot-stuffing and other fraudulent activities.
Dykstra justified Brown’s decree with the spurious claim that Brown had the “legal responsibility and authority” to determine which candidates’ nominations papers he would sign. Indeed, section 27(2)(h) of Ontario’s Election Act does explicitly require that a candidate’s nomination papers be “signed by the leader of a party” as a statement “that the prospective candidate is endorsed by the party” (emphasis added). But it is explicitly the PC Party’s mandate, not the leader’s, to endorse candidates. And, as Justice Borenstein noted, a party’s process for selecting its candidates is set out in that party’s constitution.
Brown and Dykstra were wrong to falsely assert that Leader Brown had the “power” to overrule, or ignore, the results of local nominations, and to disregard whether they were done in an “open, public, and democratic” process. By any reading, “democratic,” in the context of the PC constitution, means the will of PC Party members, not the will of the leader. In collaborating to usurp the rights of PC Party members, Brown and Dykstra also violated their own obligation to “uphold this constitution” (Article 7.1).
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