Grit boss hopes to change first impression as weak leader

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THE CANADIAN PRESS

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OTTAWA - Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion made a lousy first impression when he landed on the federal political scene.

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The Canadian Press

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion hopes to turn his fortunes around once the election campaign officially begins.

The Canadian Press

Students listen to Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion yesterday during a town hall meeting on the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton.

Former prime minister Jean Chrétien had decided to recruit the owlish political scientist into his cabinet after watching him vigorously defend federalism on TV panels during the nail-biter 1995 referendum on Quebec independence.

Confiding in no one but his wife, Chrétien invited Dion to the prime minister's official residence to make the life-altering job offer.

"He arrived on foot in a snow storm and had to be escorted by a friend or else he wouldn't have found the house," Chrétien recounts in his recently published memoirs.

"When he showed up wearing heavy boots and a toque, covered in snow and carrying a knap-sack on his back, I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, what have I got myself involved with?' "

A good many Liberals are asking themselves the same question as they prepare to fight their first election campaign with Dion at the helm.

But, just as Dion ultimately proved to Chrétien that first impressions can be misleading, he's hoping to prove to Liberals and Canadian voters that he has what it takes to be prime minister.

"People have always underestimated me," he said the morning after his surprise leadership victory in December 2006.

"It has worked for me."

Indeed. Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard famously dismissed Dion as a nobody. Yet that nobody withstood the vilification of Bouchard and other separatists to rewrite the rules of the secession game, now enshrined in the Clarity Act.

Along the way, he became Chrétien's most valued minister.

He defied the polls and the pundits to stage a stunning come-from-behind victory at the 2006 federal Liberal leadership convention, overtaking front-runners Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae.

But pulling off a similar upset in his first election campaign as leader may be a taller order.

If expectations were low when Dion assumed the leadership, they are even lower now after 20 tumultuous months at the helm.

The 52-year-old has been beset by problems: internal sniping, upheavals in his office, campaign team and party headquarters, a humiliating byelection defeat, dropping party membership, and abysmal fundraising results.

Over the past year, he's repeatedly backed down from threats to topple the minority Harper government, lending credence to relentless Tory attack ads that depict him as weak, indecisive and "not a leader."

He managed to quell some criticism when he decided in June to stake his political fate on a single bold measure: a complicated plan to impose a carbon tax on fossil fuels, offset by income tax cuts and tax benefits for the most vulnerable.

The details of the so-called Green Shift have met with mixed reviews -- accolades from environmentalists and some economists, fierce denunciations from farmers, truckers and some provinces who fear they'll be disproportionately whacked by increased fossil fuel costs.

And the proposal has presented the Tories with a juicy target.

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper so eloquently put it recently, Dion's plan would "screw everybody" by imposing a "tax on everything."