This is the third in The Globe's series of profiles of the Liberal leadership candidates.
QUEBEC — Stéphane Dion remembers the taunts he heard as a child in the early 1960s, growing up in a family of secular intellectuals in this sedate, old-fashioned provincial capital.
"You're going to burn in hell because you don't go to Sunday mass," the neighbourhood kids used to tell him.
Quebec was then on the cusp of tectonic social shifts, moving from the grip of the Roman Catholic Church to the modernity of the Quiet Revolution. So it wasn't long before those who mocked him changed their tune, Mr. Dion recalls. Soon, "they, too, were on the ski slopes with us on Sunday."
Stéphane Dion
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Similarly, when it comes to politics these days, Mr. Dion is no longer hell-bound.
The onetime pariah of Quebec politics has gained newfound respect after joining the leadership race of the Liberal Party of Canada. A man who entered politics solely for his expertise on the national unity file is now accepted as a well-rounded, tier-one candidate.
Observers, even some of the Quebeckers who saw him as a humourless hard-line federalist, praise his intelligence, his experience in government and his integrity.
The anecdote is also a reminder of the immense shadow cast by his father, Léon. For when Mr. Dion was teased as a child, it was because his father was an independent-minded academic who did not fit into the rigid mould of the old religious Quebec.
Léon Dion would become the most influential political scholar of his day, though his federalism was of an ever-morphing, diffident type, unlike his son's unalloyed faith in Canada.
Today, Stéphane Dion, 50, having forsaken a promising career in the world of academia that his father so cherished, is going after Canada's highest political office.
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Mr. Dion and his followers boast that, with nearly a decade at the cabinet table in Ottawa, he has more experience in federal government than all the other leadership candidates together.
"It doesn't mean there isn't a fringe of population that still can't stand me. I know that. I can hear some people in the street react at my sight. But it's more marginal now," Mr. Dion says in an interview one recent afternoon, midway through a 14-hour day of meetings and events.
His organizers say they hope that, by the time the leadership convention unfolds in December, he can push through the first ballot and surge in later rounds.
Mr. Dion will prevail in later ballots because he has less baggage and fewer liabilities than the other candidates, his campaign chairman, former public works minister Don Boudria, predicts. "Mr. Dion has very few Liberal enemies. I don't know of any anti-Dion people in the Liberal Party."
Neutral observers are less sanguine and forecast that Mr. Dion will finish high but not the winner, perhaps having to settle for being a kingmaker.
In the Liberal Party tradition, it is a francophone's turn to be the leader.
But would voters in the rest of Canada countenance another francophone prime minister or another one from Quebec? Would Mr. Dion be able to rebuild the party in his own province, where it shrivelled after the sponsorship scandal?
At a recent campaign event in his hometown, the turnout and the mood are tepid, a reminder of the Liberals' anemic support in the francophone heartland of Quebec where the Conservatives broke through in the last election.
The event is in Charlesbourg-Haute-Saint-Charles, which has voted Bloc Québécois since 1993. Voters switched back to a federalist party in January, but they elected a Conservative.
Riding president André Garon thanks Mr. Dion and four other leadership candidates for showing up at a debate organized by Quebec City's eight ridings.
"We were feeling abandoned. We need to still see Liberals so we can give ourselves confidence again."
Mr. Garon, it turns out, decided in the previous days that he would support Bob Rae.
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Mr. Dion is accustomed to being the outsider who goes against the prevailing wisdom.
