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The Liberal Party will unveil today a website profile of leader Stéphane Dion as an outdoorsy, passionate, family- and dog-loving man with rugged interests welded to the Canadian mythologies of nature and the North.

The campaign site, called This is Dion, is designed to counter the Conservatives' substantially successful efforts to date to characterize Mr. Dion as the polar opposite of their leader, Stephen Harper – less manly, less decisive, more aloof and lacking the spine of leadership.

The portrait comes hard on the heels of 48 hours of slugfest campaigning launched by Tory attack ads against Mr. Dion and a predawn news conference where prominent Conservative MPs Jason Kenney and Lawrence Cannon tried to set the day's election news agenda. They claimed Mr. Dion would reverse the Harper government's GST cut, claw back the $1,200 child-care benefit and further burden Canadians with a carbon tax as part of his so-called Green Shift.

Mr. Dion immediately responded by calling Mr. Harper a liar, and saying his party was “piling lies upon lies” – language rarely heard in modern Canadian political campaigns.

Although ironically both the Liberals and Conservatives are warming up their leaders early in the campaign as lovable family men – Mr. Harper's dad-ads have been running for a week – political strategists unanimously agree that it's Mr. Dion who is most in need of what is called in the trade “image reframing.”

The party's conceptual description of This is Dion – campaign director Gordon Ashworth said it went through a couple of name changes – says: “The new website will show another side of the Liberal Leader. It shows how inextricably linked his policies are with his personal values of fairness, justice and love for Canada.”

Mr. Ashworth adds: “A family man, we meet his wife Janine Krieber and daughter Jeanne as they spend time together, skiing, talking and walking the family dog Kyoto. An avid outdoorsman, we can see why he's so passionate about nature, we follow him enjoying time at the lake fishing, hiking and snowshoeing.”

The site also shows a man of steel on issues, displaying “a passionate refusal to give up against tough odds” in his campaign to push the Clarity Act through Parliament and “dampen the fires of separatism.”

But what it won't show is the Stéphane Dion that many party members say they know: a man whose personality, as one senior Liberal put it this week, is far removed from the romantic abstraction – of the humble little engine that could – that won him the Liberal leadership. “He is absolutely the arrogant, stubborn know-it-all,” the Liberal said.

Mr. Ashworth said the personal portrait of Mr. Dion will appear only on the Liberals' campaign website, while the television and radio advertisements will focus exclusively on issues – possibly the first time that a Canadian political party has bifurcated its message to voters.

Perhaps unintentionally, Mr. Dion has further created an emotional, or at the very least a human, link with voters by suggesting that his difficulties with English – until now labelled a negative factor in his leadership – stem from a hereditary hearing problem that impairs his ability to isolate sounds.

Although he has been taking private English tutoring in Montreal, and he's lately been assessed as more comfortable in the language and able to use more colloquialisms, he told reporters yesterday that “it's the case that I hear everything when the sound is isolated, but when it's confused with other sounds then it's completely confused.

“If I am [at] a cocktail party and everybody is speaking at the same time, I will have difficulty, and it may affect my ability then to catch the music of the beautiful language of English.”

At this early stage of the campaign, a confusion around message and image seems still to envelop Mr. Dion and his party.

Unlike campaigns of the past, there is no Liberal mastermind like the legendary Keith Davey of the Pierre Trudeau years or John Rae of Jean Chrétien's era. Party insiders say Mr. Dion is personally writing the party's campaign platform and making decisions on advertising.

One senior Liberal said he understood Mr. Dion had vetoed negative advertising against Mr. Harper. But another said he gathered the party's main advertising thrust actually would be a negative attack on the Conservative Leader.

The conflicting statements, if nothing else, indicate that decisions are being made inside a very tiny circle around Mr. Dion – and perhaps only by Mr. Dion himself – and that the much-rumoured coming together of backroom strategists from across the party's ranks never happened.

Nor has there been any united display of up-front chieftains.

It's been observed that Mr. Dion stood alone in front of the television cameras in Ottawa on Sunday – without party stars at his side such as deputy leader Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae – to respond to Mr. Harper's request, as prime minister, to the Governor-General to call an election.

But Mr. Ashworth, the Liberal campaign director, said the Leader traditionally responds alone to an election call. And he noted that, later the same day, Mr. Dion appeared with his “Ottawa team” of candidates, and when he comes to Toronto, he will appear with his “Toronto team,” which will include Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Rae.

Mr. Ashworth said the party wants Canadians to see “a man who is quite passionate about his country, a man who has a plan, a direction he wants to take that will be exposed through the platform” – a man “dogged on the environment,” with a balanced economic blueprint that “does not lead the country into deficit like the current government.” Plus a man who is steeped in “Canadian pastimes” that fit his values – “in tune with the environment,” for example.

This is Dion also shows the Liberal Leader playing ball hockey.