Stéphane Dion’s troubled and unsuccessful two-year tenure as leader of the federal Liberal party will end with a leadership convention next spring in Vancouver.
Dion, the Montreal professor, 12-year MP and surprise winner of the leadership in 2006 as a convention compromise candidate, led the party to a 26 percent popular support level in the Oct. 14 election, its worst-ever electoral result in terms of popular vote.
The party also won 27 fewer seats than it did in the 2006 election, falling to 76 seats, 67 fewer than the minority Conservatives.
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On Oct. 20, Dion announced in Ottawa that he will step down but will lead the party through the beginning of the next session of Parliament expected to begin in mid-November.
He blamed much of the election outcome on the fact the Conservative party had more money and was able to spread “propaganda” that challenged his leadership abilities and convinced voters the Green Shift policy at the centre of the Liberal campaign was a carbon tax.
He insisted the Liberal platform was correct and the campaign was strong but the Conservatives were able to distort the result through an expensive advertising campaign that confused voters.
“People didn’t know Stéphane Dion,” he told reporters. “They knew another one, the one they saw in their living rooms for over a year.”
By deciding to step down, the staunch federalist recruited in 1996 by Jean Chrétien to do battle with the then-resurgent Quebec separatists becomes only the second Liberal leader since 1872 to fail to reach the prime minister’s office.
Dion said he regrets the election result but refused to dwell on his leadership failure.
“The past is the past,” he told a news conference. “I’m focused on the future now.”
He still owes more than $100,000 from his 2006 leadership campaign and will be leaving behind a party that is electorally weak in many parts of the country outside downtown Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver and has not been able to convert its dependence on now-outlawed corporate donations into effective grassroots fundraising.
Dion said a priority for the party must be to reform its fundraising machine so the next leader will not have to face the well-financed “propaganda” of the Conservatives without being able to respond.
When the Conservatives rolled out their relentless advertisements attacking both Dion and the Green Shift policy, “we could not counter that because of our existing financial crisis,” he said.
