Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, centre, has coffee in the home of Allen Mackinnon, right, and his wife Minda, left, during a campaign event in Toronto on Sept.16, 2011.Nathan Denette
Tim Hudak has turned on the charm.
The Progressive Conservative Leader spent the first week of the Ontario campaign angrily denouncing a Liberal tax credit he said was targeted at "foreign workers." He's also been on the defensive about one PC candidate's unpaid taxes and charges he misrepresented Leamington parents at a press conference. But on Friday in Toronto, the party took the fight to the Liberals with a press release suggesting a taxpayer-funded group was using their money to buy Liberal friendly ads. As he spoke to reporters in a supporter's dining room, he laughed frequently and cracked jokes.
For a politician who relies heavily on the script and is hard to get off message, it was a marked change in tone. As he asked Allen MacKinnon questions, he looked across the room and tried to name drop all the media outlets in a light moment.
"So when you're sitting around with the family over dinner and you hear about it in the news – let's say the Sun, or watching TVO, or Global, CBC, CTV – what jumps out of you as an example of waste?" he asked, as the media scrum laughed.
Minutes later when Mr. MacKinnon misspoke and referred to MPPs as MLAs, Hudak quipped "we've been called a lot worse."
He also joked that he named his daughter Miller so he'd get a lifetime 20 per cent discount from a local car repair shop with the same name, before transitioning to a campaign message about how the Liberals have "piled $7,000 of debt" on her back since being born almost four years ago in Ontario.
The Liberals have been gleefully pointing out any press that has been critical of Mr. Hudak, and on Friday sent out a list of what it perceived to be campaign blunders to date.
"Every day that passes makes it increasingly clear that Hudak doesn't have a plan for Ontario, a vision for the future or a team he can rely on," the Liberals said in a release.
Mr. Hudak tried to change the tone Friday, taking the fight to his chief opponents by lashing out at what he believes are taxpayer-funded ads that support the Liberals, taken out by the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association.
The association, which has received millions of dollars in provincial funding, spent $200,000 on television ads touting the province's funding for the green energy sector.
Even though the group did not technically break a provincial rule banning partisan ads, the optics do not look good. However, Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty defended the group.
"They're telling us they didn't use that money for those purposes, and I accept that," Mr. McGuinty told reporters at a campaign stop in Windsor on Friday. "We've got all kinds of organizations around the province that are committed to the democratic process that are getting involved in one way or another. I think that's a healthy thing."
The organization denies it is partisan, and said it wants to highlight ways the sector is growing.
"We would never tell Ontarians how to vote, but they need to know there are choices," said executive director Kristopher Stevens. "We are asking voters to consider the future of green energy in Ontario on election day."
With a report from Karen Howlett