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Stéphane Dion's victory at this weekend's Liberal convention sets the stage for the next election, with the new leader signalling he will campaign against the minority Conservative government on the environment issue.

The selection of the owlish academic from Quebec opens the door for the Liberals to separate themselves from the Tories on the green issue and to start pressing Prime Minister Stephen Harper harder on management of the Afghanistan military mission.

"Now we are gathered with one goal, to win the next election for Canadians," Mr. Dion, the former environment minister, said in his first speech as leader to a cheering crowd of more than 5,000 convention delegates.

The 51-year-old Montreal MP, who entered the race as a long shot, surged past the two leading contenders Saturday to win a topsy-turvy Liberal convention in four ballots. The delegates faced a final choice between two former university professors, Mr. Dion and Michael Ignatieff.

Mr. Dion entered the Commons in a 1996 by-election, after being wooed from his post as a political-science professor in Montreal by former prime minister Jean Chrétien to take on the national unity file in 1996, following the Quebec referendum.

The runner up, Mr. Ignatieff, was a Harvard professor who returned to Canada after an absence of three decades to win a seat in Toronto for the Liberals in the January election.

But Mr. Ignatieff's previous support for American military involvement in Iraq and some of his controversial academic writings on coercive interrogation of terrorists left a bad taste with many Liberals.

One of the loudest and longest rounds of applause at the convention was in appreciation for former prime minister Jean Chrétien's decision to keep Canada out of the Iraq war.

Mr. Dion, by contrast, has a freer hand to criticize government foreign and national security policy without fear his past positions will come back to haunt him.

Mr. Dion's heavy emphasis on environmental issues during the leadership race suggests the Liberal strategy will be to try to create sharp contrasts with the Tories in that area — which could help the Liberals win some of the support of the Green Party, which has swelled in opinion polls in recent months.

The Conservatives know they may be vulnerable on environmental issues, and both they and the NDP immediately hit Mr. Dion with charges that his record on combatting pollution and climate change was poor during his 18-month tenure as environment minister.

However, many ranking francophone Liberals from Quebec raised concerns that Mr. Dion will not help them win back ground in the province, because his reputation as an ultra-federalist who would turn off soft nationalists.

Tory Public Works Minister, dispatched to the Liberal convention with cabinet colleague John Baird to start attacking the new, sniped that he didn't have the support of Quebeckers in his party.

"There are very few senior Quebec Liberals around Mr. Dion, and that's actually quite telling," Tory Public Works Minister Michael Fortier said.

Mr. Dion made a direct appeal to Quebeckers in his speech, saying that Canada cannot succeed unless Quebeckers' culture is allowed to thrive, but that Quebeckers should never abandon their attachment to Canada.

"Quebeckers, Canada belongs to us completely, as it does to all Canadians," he said. "Nothing stops us from succeeding in our country, even when we speak English with a French accent."

Even at the convention that elected him leader, however, some delegates expressed concern that Mr. Dion may have communications difficulties in English, and that people in the rest of the country do not want a third straight Liberal leader from Quebec.