Liberals asked to give Dion time to decide future after painful loss

By Juliet O'Neill
Canwest News Service

Dion insiders said the 53-year-old Montreal MP faces an agonizing decision on whether to bow to requests to resign. (Christinne Muschi/Reuters)

MONTREAL - Liberals have been asked to give Stephane Dion respect and breathing room while he decides whether to go gracefully or put up a fight for his leadership in the aftermath of his party's losses at the polls.

"If there is any message I want to send out to Liberals it is to treat Stephane with enormous respect," Senator David Smith, a national Liberal campaign co-chairman, said in an interview Wednesday.

Dion insiders said the 53-year-old Montreal MP faces an agonizing decision on whether to bow to requests from some Liberals to quickly signal that he will resign, allowing for a graceful exit, or to stick with his determined vow in the closing days of the campaign that "I am not a quitter."

The Liberals have an automatic post-election leadership review scheduled for May, but Liberals could leapfrog straight to a leadership contest sooner than that if Dion steps down.

Smith, a veteran of Liberal campaigns dating back to Pierre Trudeau's era, suggested Dion's decision is not solely his to make, but is a matter of "consensus" in the party.

However, he suggested that rivals to Dion's leadership should keep a lid on it in the meantime. He did not name anyone but it's an open secret that deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and Toronto MP Bob Rae, top contenders for the leadership that Dion won in December 2006, have been waiting in the wings for another try.

"I think that anybody who does any pushing is not a Liberal family team member," Smith said. "That's not what we need. We want to be supportive of his situation and he'll come to his own conclusions, whatever they might be."

Smith said he believes "the Liberal brand is still strong" despite the loss of 19 seats, and a poor showing of 26 per cent of the popular vote. Toronto "remains a fort" for the party, who won 76 of 308 seats Tuesday.

Smith denied assertions from some within Dion's entourage that it was the party who let Dion down in a campaign in which he struggled against multi-million-dollar Conservative ads portraying him as a weak leader and casting the Green Shift as a tax grab.

He said it is a matter of public knowledge that some Liberal caucus members had "reservations" about the Green Shift plan to impose a carbon tax and redistribute the revenue through tax cuts.

"But having said all that, people weren't leaving him on a little island or anything like that," Smith said. "I mean we made a commitment and we stuck with it."

He spoke as Dion burned up the phone lines in a private day of calling Liberal candidates, winners and losers, to deliver commiseration and congratulations and to discuss his future with some of them.

Dion rejected advice from some Liberals on election night to immediately announce his resignation as Paul Martin did in 2006, when his minority Liberal government was defeated by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who prevailed again this time with another minority government.

Dion was not prepared to make such a dramatic move because he was reeling from the election outcome, having been told only shortly before the polls closed that the Liberals were about to take a hit. He was protected from the bad news to keep him pumped during a final cross-Canada sprint on election eve to ridings where Liberal candidates were in big trouble.

"He poured his heart out," Smith said. "And I think it was frustrating for him that a lot of Canadians just didn't understand the environmental initiative that he was proposing."