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Tim Hudak has gotten under the Ontario Liberals' skins.

Truth be told, Mr. Hudak's Conservatives have gotten under the skins of most everyone around Queen's Park this week. Among other means of protesting the passage into law of the new harmonized sales tax, they've been incessantly ringing the bells meant to call MPPs into the legislature – a skull-piercing tactic that makes it seem like the provincial capital is running an interminable fire drill.

But it's not the goofy antics in the legislature that are primarily of concern to the Liberals. It's the fact that, in his messaging on the HST and most everything else, Mr. Hudak is playing the sort of hardball to which the governing party had grown unaccustomed.

With John Tory, whose good manners were ill-suited to opposition, the Liberals were spoiled. Mr. Tory attempted to debate the equally mannerly Dalton McGuinty on his own terms, and repeatedly lost – his case against the government rarely compressing itself into a cogent sound bite that people outside the political world could easily process.

If Mr. Tory were still the opposition leader, the third-place NDP would be virtually alone in making a strong case against the HST. Mr. Tory, as was often the case, would have felt pressure from his party to oppose a policy he would otherwise have been inclined to support. So he likely would have spouted some unconvincing argument to the effect that it was the wrong time to introduce a reform that would be worth revisiting down the road, and the Liberals would barely have flinched.

Mr. Hudak has gone a different route, in which he is unencumbered by nuance – or, the Liberals complain, by facts. Whether he's in the legislature or escaping it to traverse the province, the latter of which he's wisely spending much of his time doing, he's devoting all his energy to framing the HST as a gigantic “tax grab.”

That's not actually true; if anything, the government will lose revenue from the changes over the next few years. But it's been broadly accepted as reality, by some of the media and a good chunk of the public, because it's easily digestible.

This is a source of much frustration for the Liberals, because from their perspective they've done many of the right things in selling the HST – lining up supportive business groups and economists, assigning a new revenue minister to travel around singing its praises, and so on. But because Mr. Hudak is telling a simple story about the HST's alleged evils, and they're telling a much more convoluted one about its economic benefits, his version might be winning.

This is not the first time that Mr. Hudak's willingness to drive home a simple but somewhat disingenuous message has caused the Liberals grief.

The province's troubled eHealth program has not wasted $1-billion; that's the total amount spent on it, which has produced some (though not nearly enough) results. But as soon as Mr. Hudak saw the $1-billion figure in last month's report by the provincial auditor-general, he pounced. The Liberals were too busy self-flagellating over the eHealth scandal to bother debunking the Tories' attacks, and before long it had come to be widely known as the “billion-dollar boondoggle.”

Liberals purport to be optimistic that, when the public takes a closer look at Mr. Hudak and his tactics, it will find him as irritating as they do. But the odds are that, as the 2011 election draws closer, he will begin to adopt a more sunny disposition and a more positive message, leaving the mud-flinging to other Tories. The question is whether, in the meanwhile, he sets so many of the storylines that voters have a thoroughly unfavourable impression of the government by then.

After driving him out of provincial politics, many Liberals now sound decidedly nostalgic about Mr. Tory, fondly recalling his honesty and integrity. One wonders how many of them now wish they'd simply let him run uncontested in a by-election last winter, rather than handing him the humiliating defeat that ushered him out of provincial politics.

In any event, the genteel era of Ontario politics is over. Mr. Hudak is not going to fight on the Liberals' terms. At some point, they may need to take the gloves off and fight on his.