PROFILE: Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak

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Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak tries hard to separate his personal life from politics. But this summer, his personal life became public knowledge.

After cancelling a succession of campaign events with little notice and no official explanation, Hudak announced through a statement that his three-year-old daughter Miller had been hospitalized at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children.

Hudak's staff wouldn't say how serious it was, but one could see and hear it by how viscerally upset and worried they appeared. The nature of her illness was never revealed publicly, but it emerged Miller was in intensive care. There was a big sigh of relief at Queen's Park when the little girl came out of the ICU, and eventually home.

Hudak's first major interview afterward was on CBC Radio's Metro Morning. Host Matt Galloway asked Hudak about his daughter's health, and what the experience had taught him about the health system.

Hudak talked of how every time he meets a new health practitioner he has to rely on his wife's memory to list all of Miller's medications. In a flash, he turned the conversation political. "That speaks to the real tragedy of the money that we lost in that eHealth boondoggle," he said.

"My vet has a record for my dog when he needs to have his procedures. But for my daughter, for ourselves, electronic health records are sadly missing. We've not made good progress."

Being a father seems central to the 43-year-old Hudak's persona. His staff says he spends almost every minute of his spare time with his daughter playing with her and taking her to parks and playgrounds near their homes in Toronto and Wellandport, in Hudak's riding of Niagara West-Glanbrook.

Miller was born prematurely right in the middle of the 2007 election campaign. She spent her first three weeks of life in the neonatal ICU at Women's College, so Hudak stopped campaigning to be with her. He won his seat by his widest margin yet, something that's prompted him to joke maybe he shouldn't hit the campaign trial this time at all.

Not a rookie

But he will, and must. Polls suggest the man who could become Ontario's next premier is still not well known by voters. And he wants to define himself before the Liberals do it for him in a way that's bound to be unflattering.

The Liberal party's first attack ad against Hudak started running this summer, using such quotes from newspapers as "Hudak treats us like dolts … like chumps." Liberal news releases about Hudak frequently end with the line that he's "just in it for himself."

For a while, the Liberals were trying to define him as a "reckless rookie." In fact, he's a veteran politician — he's been an MPP for 16 years.

Hudak was first elected to Queen's Park in 1995, riding the wave of the Common Sense Revolution. He was just 27 years old, prompting opponents to criticize him as someone who's barely had a job outside politics.

Hudak grew up in the border town of Fort Erie, and spent summers working on the border as a Canada Customs agent. He did his undergrad at the University of Western Ontario, then went to the University of Washington in Seattle on a scholarship, getting a master's degree in economics in 1993.

One year later he was working for Wal-Mart as part of a team of managers transforming old Woolco stores across Canada. The year after that he was an MPP.

Harris cabinet member

In his second term he became a cabinet minister in the governments of both Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, holding the lower-profile posts of Northern Development, Tourism, and Consumer Services.

When John Tory quit as PC leader after failing to win a seat twice in a row, Hudak was one of four MPPs to vie for the leadership. He telegraphed his intention of where he wanted to take the party with his leadership campaign slogan: "Right for Ontario." His policies and rhetoric aimed to emphasize the conservative in Progressive Conservative. And he came out on top in the party's leadership vote in June 2009.

Harris endorsed Hudak's run for the leadership, and Hudak's wife Debbie Hutton was a senior adviser to Harris. So the Liberals have regularly tried to paint him as the second coming of Harris.

While Hudak has never publicly criticized what happened in Ontario in the Harris years, he has tried to reassure people that he will not shut hospitals and cut education funding.

Whenever his education policies are challenged, Hudak is quick to point out that he grew up in a family of educators - his father Patrick was a school principal, his mother Anne Marie a special needs teacher. He also likes to mention his family's immigrant roots, with grandparents coming to Canada from the former Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.

Hudak played and coached various sports in his younger days and is a big football fan, particularly of the NFL's Buffalo Bills. But now his main recreation is walking the family dog Tavish, who joined the family last Christmas.

He says people frequently smile at him and say hello as he walks along, and just when he thinks those TV commercials are starting to pay off and more voters are recognizing him, they bend down to pet the dog.

Progressive Conservative party platform: