Dion

There’s nothing like a major screw-up to look good by bouncing back.

Two days after seeing his handpicked candidate suffer a humiliating defeat in the Outremont by-election to the hands of the NDP, Stephane Dion has regrouped his party and started over again from January with a new breath of life.

This morning, after finishing my usual session of violin practice, I decided to pick up the computer and spend a few minutes reading the Globe and Mail online. While waiting for the page to load, I had trying to guess the day’s front page story. “The Lonnie nearly reached parity with the Greenback yesterday,” I told myself, “so there’s bound to be something on that topic. Maybe there’d also been something about the Ontario elections, they seem to be generating a lot of excitement.

Well it was neither the Loonie not McGuinty. The headline read “Dion wants Khadr Tried in Civil Court.” That was certainly a surprising. “Dion, in the newspaper? ” All the more astonishing that he had already had a good mention on the previous day. What was he doing to deserve such publicity,” I asked myself again.

But the answer is actually deceivingly simple: Dion’s finally decided to break out of his shell and become a real leader. He’s always been in total command of his files, and decisions such as the handpicking of Foreign Affairs expert and academic Jocelyn Coulon demonstrate this very well, but he’s never actually gone off to sell thesis idea to Canadians. Stephane Dion has no charistma, and no communications skill, but he does his homework and understands his files. Now he needs to demonstrate that to Canadians.