Two speeches, two months, two Tim Hudaks.

Mark my words, the Tory leader vowed at a business lunch in December: he would implement a controversial “right to work” law reining in unions.

Read my lips, Hudak pledged at a business breakfast Friday: he promised never to undo compulsory union dues if his Tories win power.

How to explain the rocky U-turn? After campaigning for “bold” change, what changed?

Right to work wasn’t working for him. After talking it up for two years — most recently in a prime time TV interview on Jan. 29 — Hudak feared the policy would drag him down in a possible spring election.

The climbdown came just days after he was humbled on his home turf in a crucial Feb. 13 byelection in Niagara Falls (near his own riding). Tories had been watching closely to see if their anti-union policies would prove to be a winning wedge.

Instead, right to work was a wedge too far. It provoked a union backlash that provided boots on the ground to help defeat them in Niagara.

Despite his recent renunciation, it may yet come back to haunt Hudak: his political and labour opponents will keep accusing him of harbouring a hidden agenda — or more precisely, a hibernating agenda that could come out of hiding once the political climate changes.

Now, unions have revived an anti-Tory coalition that had been slumbering since the 2011 election. The media are branding him anti-labour. And rival MPPs are heckling him incessantly as anti-union in the legislature.

The spread of right-to-work laws across the U.S. had been an inspiration to Hudak. In a mid-2012 discussion paper, he called for similar “flexible labour markets” in Ontario:

“We are proposing to give workers an expanded choice when it comes to becoming and remaining a union member, or not — and to ensure a worker’s individual choice to pay union dues, or not.”

Making union dues optional would go against the historic compromise crafted six decades ago by judge Ivan Rand to settle a strike at a Windsor auto plant. Rand reasoned that everyone in the workplace should pay union dues to prevent the unfairness of “free riders” coasting on the hard-won achievements of collective bargaining. A Progressive Conservative government made it Ontario law in the early 1980s.

In his December speech to Toronto’s Economic Club, Hudak was unequivocal: “We are still operating under the same labour rules as we did in the 1940s” — a reference to the 1946 Rand Formula.

Under Hudak’s plan, workers could “choose whether or not to pay union dues.” He emphasized: “These choices are no longer optional; they are required.”

There was speculation in early January that Hudak had suddenly dropped right-to-work because it wasn’t part of a private member’s bill he unveiled on job creation. But his inner circle scoffed at the reports, and in a Jan. 29 broadcast of TVO’s The Agenda, Hudak restated it explicitly:

“I’m tired of seeing Michigan and Indiana (right-to-work states) eat our lunch,” he began. “I call it worker choice.”

But would it be in his platform?

“We have no choice,” Hudak told host Steve Paikin. “It’s not only the United States; it’s England, it’s I think 40-some countries in Europe, Australia, New Zealand — they’ve all modernized their labour laws.”

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He vowed not to bend, because voters want “somebody who is actually going to take the bull by the horns … that’s not going to run away just because, you know, Sid Ryan doesn’t like one of your ideas — the head of the (Ontario) Federation of Labour.”

Two weeks later, the Niagara Falls byelection was lost. And the policy tossed.

Right-to-work was always wrong-headed public policy, with no serious economic underpinnings. Just listen to the tortuous zigzag in Hudak’s Friday breakfast speech — first supporting right-to-work on ideological grounds, then jettisoning it for economic reasons:

“The arguments make sense — why should anybody have to join a union they don’t support?” Hudak asked. But with a mere 15 per cent of private sector workers unionized, he acknowledged its irrelevancy.

“This right-to-work issue just doesn’t have the scope or the power to fix the issues … So if we’re elected, we’re not going to do it — we’re not going to change the so-called Rand Formula.”

The Tories are in a hurry to erase their Rand stance because they cannot forget a controversial promise to fund religious private schools in the 2007 campaign, which alienated many voters. Haunted by faith-based funding, Hudak has now renounced right-to-work even though it remains a personal article of faith.

It’s not a change of heart, just a political gut check: what he once envisioned as an electoral attraction is now a political distraction.

In fact, the campaign landscape has shifted since Hudak first unveiled his vision: as the minority Liberals increasingly tack left to outdo the New Democrats, they are vacating more space in the centre for the Tories to occupy.

In the aftermath of a painful byelection defeat, on the eve of a possible spring general election, right-to-work was just too right-wing to gamble on. Hence Hudak’s last-minute conversion to new talking points — with the old ones left unsaid.

Mark my words on right-to-work?

Never mind. Read my lips on Rand.