OTTAWA - Liberal Leader Stephane Dion made a lousy first impression when he landed on the federal political scene.
Former prime minister Jean Chretien had decided to recruit the owlish political scientist into his cabinet after watching him vigorously defend federalism on TV panels during the nail-biter 1995 referendum on Quebec independence.
On the urging of his wife Aline, Chretien invited Dion to the prime minister's official residence to make the life-altering job offer.
"He arrived on foot in a snow storm and had to be escorted by a friend or else he wouldn't have found the house," Chretien recounted in his memoirs.
"When he showed up wearing heavy boots and a toque, covered in snow and carrying a knap-sack on his back, I thought to myself, `Oh my God, what have I got myself involved with?' "
Dion ultimately proved to Chretien that first impressions can be misleading. But he'll have a harder time convincing his beaten-down party to give him another chance.
Facing their second-worst defeat in history, many senior Liberals are privately predicting that Dion will be forced to quit within a few weeks if he doesn't voluntarily resign first.
Yet Dion's first and perhaps last campaign to become prime minister wasn't the flat-out disaster that doubters had originally feared.
He capitalized on low expectations and emerged a surprise winner, in the eyes of many observers, in the French leaders' debate. He followed that with a respectable performance in the English round.
It wasn't until a tailspin gripped world financial markets, however, that the Liberal campaign showed real signs of life.
Dion seized on growing consumer angst with a promised economic action plan. Within 30 days of forming a government, he said, he would meet the premiers to spur infrastructure projects, convene major regulatory financial agencies, and speed federal cash injections to boost central Canada's flagging manufacturing sector.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismissed the proposals as 11th-hour tinkering with the Liberal platform.
But Dion's apparent empathy with families fearing for their jobs, mortgages and pensions gave him a brief lift in the polls that, in the second-last week of the campaign, brought his party within striking distance of the Tory front-runners for the first time since Harper had called the election on Sept. 7.
That momentum slowed, however, with the release of footage showing Dion's painfully botched handling of a TV interviewer's awkwardly phrased question on the economy.
He insisted it was a simple misunderstanding that stemmed in part from a hearing impediment and an admittedly limits grasp of English.
But Harper used the flub -- widely replayed on YouTube -- as ammunition in his seemingly endless, often personal attacks on Dion as a bumbler who was "not worth the risk" as a prospective prime minister. Internet chatter on the resulting controversy was split between disgust over Conservative meanness and disbelief that Dion could so easily be thrown off track.
The Liberal leader understands better than most what it is to be written off, discounted or just plain ignored.
"People have always underestimated me," he said the morning after his surprise leadership victory in December 2006.
"It has worked for me."
Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard famously dismissed Dion as a nobody. Yet that nobody withstood the vilification of Bouchard and other separatists to rewrite the rules of the secession game, now enshrined in the Clarity Act.
Along the way, he became Chretien's most valued minister.
He defied the polls and the pundits to stage a stunning come-from-behind victory at the 2006 federal Liberal leadership convention, overtaking front-runners Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae.
But pulling his first election campaign as leader turned out to be even more of a challenge.
The 53-year-old Dion was already beset by problems before the campaign began: internal sniping, upheavals in his office, campaign team and party headquarters, dropping party membership, and abysmal fundraising results.
Over the past year, he had repeatedly backed away from threats to topple the minority Harper government, lending credence to relentless Tory attack ads depicting him as weak, indecisive and "not a leader."
He also decided in June to stake his political fate on a single bold measure: a complicated plan to impose a carbon tax on fossil fuels, offset by income tax cuts and other tax benefits for the most vulnerable.
The details of the so-called Green Shift were met with mixed reviews -- accolades from environmentalists and 250 economists, fierce denunciations from farmers, truckers and some provinces who feared they would be disproportionately whacked by increased fossil fuel costs.
The proposal presented the Tories with a juicy target. As Harper baldly put it, Dion's plan would "screw everybody" by imposing a "tax on everything."
Dion's defenders answered that the plan helped him to redefine himself as a leader with the courage and conviction to tackle climate change despite the obvious political risks.
Whether it was a help or a hindrance in his quest to become prime minister was another matter. Concern about the consumer costs of the Green Shift, just as many voters were fretting about finances, had Dion on the defensive during much of the campaign.
Over and over again, he found himself thrown off other messages to reiterate his contention that a carbon tax would be offset by income tax breaks and other benefits.
His halting English improved somewhat over five intense weeks on the hustings. He even showed signs of mastering the political art of communicating in short, sharp messages -- in both languages.
But his best asset was perhaps Harper's major drawback.
While the prime minister outscored Dion in leadership polls, a majority of voters still appeared to have reservations about Harper. Liberal strategists figured their best hope of success was to play on the public perception that Harper had an underlying mean streak -- and to fan fears among soft NDP and Green voters of what he might do with a Tory majority.
Dion's call to progressive voters to "'Think green, vote red"' was his strongest appeal as he tried, in the last days of the campaign, to unite a splintered left-of-centre vote.
It was a huge challenge and the stakes couldn't have been higher.
As Liberal MPs repeatedly point out in private, Dion was a compromise choice for leader. Although he was less polarizing than Ignatieff or Rae, he was the first choice of only 17.8 per cent of Liberals -- an embarrassingly small base of hard-core support if he had to face a leadership confidence vote following an election defeat.
Only one other Liberal leader in Canadian history has failed to become prime minister -- Edward Blake, who led the party to defeat in the 1882 and 1887 elections.
Dion's willingness to go quietly after an election loss seemed doubtful, however. He told reporters on the weekend he had no plans to quit. Ever.
