MONTREAL — DION
THE NATIONAL UNITY CARD
Beat Gerard Kennedy on the first ballot with the help of growing ex-officio support, then leap-frog over Bob Rae with the help of Kennedy and Ken Dryden supporters.
Confront Michael Ignatieff on the final ballot by defining the ballot question as who is best equipped to hold the Liberal Party and the country together.
That is the scenario Stéphane Dion campaign manager Mark Marissen outlines as the way to make his candidate the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Noting the high number of people in The Globe and Mail/CTV Strategic Counsel poll who indicated they would never vote for either Mr. Ignatieff (26 per cent) or Mr. Rae (26 per cent), Mr. Marissen said the message his campaign is sending delegates is "If you don't want Ignatieff or Rae, then it's Dion." (Only 4 per cent said they would never vote for Mr. Dion.)
Mr. Dion is not so blunt as his campaign manager. He told reporters as he registered yesterday: "People are very motivated. You see that everywhere and you will see that they came to me because they want me to win, not because they thought I would win, this is a big difference."
This is especially the case for the steady stream of ex-officio delegates who were putting on Dion buttons and T-shirts yesterday. Although there is a potential of 1,000 or more ex-officio delegates (MPs, senators, former candidates, Privy Council members and party executives), no more than half of them are expected to show up. The Dion campaign asserts that as of yesterday, at least 130 of them will be voting for Mr. Dion. If true, that means he has surpassed Mr. Rae and Mr. Kennedy in this category.
"We don't have the biggest machine, we have the biggest heart. And because of that we started as a network, we became a movement, and we will be a winning movement," Mr. Dion told reporters as he arrived.
Harold Taylor, a former member of the Manitoba Legislature and Manitoba chair for Mr. Dion, said that Mr. Dion's support as environment minister for the Red River Basin conservation project has won him much support in the province. On second and subsequent ballots, Mr. Dion is gaining support from Scott Brison and Ken Dryden delegates, even if their candidates may be backing someone else, Mr. Taylor said.
With the race so unpredictable at this point, much will depend on the candidate speeches tomorrow night. Mr. Dion will stress his ability to unite the party since he has come to the race with so little political baggage.
He will also deal with delegates' concerns about choosing another leader from Quebec by stressing the national unity card.
But in the corridors, Mr. Marissen and his team will be pointing out the success the Liberal Party has had with leaders from Quebec. "There are only five leaders that have won Liberal majorities and four of those are from Quebec, Wilfrid Laurier, Louis St. Laurent, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien." The only other majority winner was William Lyon Mackenzie King.
--Hugh Winsor
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IGNATIEFF
CORNERING DELEGATES
Rob Oliphant talks about the next couple of days as the evangelism period for Michael Ignatieff's leadership campaign: the hard-slogging job of spreading the good news about Mr. Ignatieff at the Liberal Party convention, delegate by delegate by delegate.
Rev. Oliphant is pastor of St. George's United Church in north Toronto. He also is co-chair of Mr. Ignatieff's campaign committee for proselytizing to ex officio delegates -- the members of Parliament and executives of constituency associations who can be expected to influence the votes of other party delegates.
"It's evangelism. It's storytelling," Rev. Oliphant says. "Senator Grant Mitchell in Alberta uses the slogan 'Each one reach one,' which sounds a bit cheesy but that's what it is about."
It sounds almost banal. No machine politics. No drama of a bottom-of-the-ballot candidate suddenly directing his or her delegates to vote for someone else.
Ignatieff campaign strategists were impressing on their supporters yesterday that the only way to boost Mr. Ignatieff's front-running first-ballot support on subsequent balloting was to corner every delegate without a Michael Ignatieff button and extol the virtues of their candidate.
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