She won much admiration for putting a yellow rose on the empty desk of rival Bloc Québécois party leader Lucien Bouchard, who was suffering from a life-threatening illness.
Due to her success in questioning Canadian Heritage Minister Michel Dupuy, she was promoted to critic for Human Resources Development Canada.
The next month, however, Reform MP Bob Ringma mentioned that store owners should be free to move gays and "ethnics" "to the back of the shop", or even to fire them, if it helped their business.
In the 1997 election, she ran as a Progressive Conservative, moving to contest the adjacent riding of Calgary Southwest, then represented by Reform leader Preston Manning.
Despite drawing much attention in the sometimes bitter campaign against her former party leader, Brown lost by a significant margin, and retired permanently from politics.