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For a brief time Friday night, the very different problems of the two most powerful Liberals in the country intersected in a city with more than enough troubles of its own.

Everything about the Ontario Liberals' convention was meant to help convey - to the rank-and-file, and to the few journalists gathered there - that Dalton McGuinty grasps the scope of the challenges ahead of him.

To begin with, there was the location. Much of Ontario has been hard-hit by the recession, but nowhere quite like Windsor - a place where, courtesy of the auto industry's collapse, the 14 per cent unemployment rate is by far the highest of any city in Canada. It is, as one Liberal put it, ground zero.

Then there was the program. Ordinarily, annual conventions - basically a payoff for grassroots members, who get to rub elbows with party elites - are chock full of all the rah-rah boosterism anyone can handle. But in the midst of their toughest period since taking office, Mr. McGuinty's Liberals knew that wouldn't cut it. Liberals turning up in a poverty-stricken town amid expense scandals, a $24.7-billion provincial deficit and the troubled response to H1N1 would have looked ludicrous spending the weekend congratulating themselves for a job well done.

So rather than rally the troops, Mr. McGuinty sought to engage them in a branding exercise. His aim is to paint himself as the premier willing to make the tough decisions, even if they're not the politically popular ones. So with a low-key speech and a question-and-answer session aimed at showcasing accountability and addressing head on controversies such as the new harmonized sales tax, he sought to convey that there's a steady hand at the helm.

Complicating his life considerably was that Michael Ignatieff - just about the least steady hand at any helm over the past while - seized upon this as an opportunity to try to right his own ship.

At the end of a brutal week in which he axed his chief of staff, following a brutal couple of months in which his election posturing (and subsequent climb down) contributed to plummeting polling numbers, the federal Liberal Leader made a surprise appearance in Windsor to speak to a rare friendly audience.

Michael Ignatieff was not the weekend's keynote speaker; that honour officially belonged to Ted Sorensen, the former JFK speechwriter. (Mr. Sorensen's Saturday address, which focused on the responsibility and burden of governance, was widely considered the weekend's highlight.) But Mr. Ignatieff appeared to interpret that as his mandate anyway.

Organizers seemed to expect that Mr. Ignatieff would spend a couple of minutes introducing Mr. McGuinty, then head on his merry way. That was indeed how it initially looked, the exhausted-looking opposition leader flatly singing the praises of his provincial cousins. But it soon morphed into a 15-minute tub-thumper that concluded with a rousing call to arms against Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Given the contrast with the otherwise sombre tone, not to mention the fact that it forced the Liberals to tighten the rest of the program, the effect was to make Mr. Ignatieff the star of the show. (With a bit of federal star power helping his cause, Mr. Ignatieff spent the rest of the evening posing for photos and welcoming delegates to his crowded hospitality suite.) But it also served to rather confuse things, distracting from Mr. McGuinty's intended message if not flat-out undermining it.

The behind-the-scenes relationship between senior federal and provincial Liberals, somewhat strained to begin with, is unlikely to improve as a result. That may cause some discomfort among the grassroots, most of whom consider themselves both federal and provincial members. But the bigger concern for both sides is the degree to which the Liberal brand - the one Mr. McGuinty was trying so hard to define - has become muddled.

Although damning with faint praise, it's fair to say that Mr. McGuinty's brand in Ontario is currently stronger than Mr. Ignatieff's; even with all his recent problems, the Premier remains ahead of his opponents in the polls. But it will be a herculean task for him to protect that brand over the final two years of his current mandate, as he tries to adapt it to his province's - and his government's - troubled times. The last thing he needs is another Liberal Leader piling his problems atop his own.