Brampton Mayor Brown didn’t use city staff during his campaign for Conservative leadership as a city councillor alleged

Brampton’s integrity commissioner has found Mayor Patrick Brown did not use city staff during his campaign for Conservative leadership as a city councillor alleged.

On June 20, Elaine Moore, then freshly and controversially appointed to City Council, brought forward a complaint to the Brampton Integrity Commissioner’s office.

Citing a story from a far-right commentary site, Moore brought forward concerns that Brown had used city staff in his run for Conservative Party (CPC) leader.

These allegations came weeks before Brown was eventually disqualified from the leadership race amid different allegations from a party official Brown’s campaign workers received payments from a third party.

Brown has denied all allegations, asserting his ouster from the race was orchestrated by supports of front-runner Pierre Poilievre. The Poilievre campaign has denied any involvement.

While the allegations into third-party payments remains underway by the CPC, the earlier allegations from Moore have been seemingly put to bed.

On August 18, the Integrity Commissioners Officer released a statement saying, “we are unable to find that the Mayor breached the Code of Conduct as alleged.”

The Commissioners officer stressed they did not consider the Rebel News story “to reflect journalistic objectivity,” the piece did serve to confirm that seven staffers did indeed work part of the work day on Brown’s campaign on June 3.

However, Brown’s office was able to show through the city’s electronic time record that all participating staff were off work at the time. Thus they were not being paid by the city.

Under the Code of Conduct, “staff are permitted to volunteer their time for election campaign related work if they are on vacation or take a leave of absence,” the commissioner’s report reads.

The time recording system is automatically updated, so each person off work that time had to manually enter the fact they were on vacation time, a leave of absence or with banked lieu days.

“The available City records show that staff time for the dates they were known to be working on the campaign was recorded either as vacation or lieu time or, in one case, a leave of absence,” said the report.

The commissioner did note however that the electronic time system is the only record available of employees taking time to work on campaigns. They recommend an updated process that would leave more documentation “to ensure better records are available in the future.”

In a statement released shortly after the report was release Brown said he was “vindicated.”

“The allegations came from a bogus story,” Brown continued, “and pushed by Elaine Moore, and both [Moore and the outlet] should apologize to all the City staff they smeared with false allegations.”

He alleged that the site’s “obsession” with him is based on “my history of standing up against their agenda of hate, intolerance and islamophobia. Their story was motivated by politics and not truth, and the entire investigation was a waste of taxpayer money.”