This is an insightful profile of Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak. You really get a sense that his family has been and continues to be central to his life. Both in public and in private. However I disagree with the title and some of the professors assertions at the end.
From Canadian Press
Ask Hudak who he is, and he’ll describe himself as a high-school jock who grew up in the Niagara border town of Fort Erie with his younger sister Tricia, the grandchildren of immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia.
Senior aide Carrie Kormos, who grew up on the same street as Hudak, describes the neighbourhood as typically middle-class, where every kid played some kind of sport and would gather for pick-up games of road hockey or hikes in the woods. She often saw Hudak shooting hoops in the front driveway.
Hudak was athletic and made the high-school teams, but he was also very smart, said a source who knew Hudak in his youth.
“One of the smartest guys in the school, actually,” the source said. “Always did well in school, never got in any trouble…Most people would have described him as a good student more than they described him a great athlete, to be honest.”
His academic acumen may have had something to do with his parents, who were both teachers and community volunteers. His father Pat, a retired Catholic school principal, plays on a seniors’ football team in Buffalo that went to the U.S. national championship. His mother Anne Marie, a former physical education and special needs teacher, was a tennis player and three-time town councillor.
But it wasn’t until university that he realized his political leanings were more right than left. It was the late 1980s — an “epic time” for the conservative movement, with Ronald Regan in the White House and Margaret Thatcher ruling Britain. Hudak still counts Regan as one of his idols.
