Stephane Dion roars to Liberal leadership win after coming from behind

"The most exciting race in the history of our party is over," Dion told the cheek-to-jowl delegates packed in the Palais des congres, some with tears of defeat streaming down their faces.

"Let's get ready for the election!"

For a bookish former professor with a low-budget, heavily indebted campaign who came into the convention ranked fourth, Dion won by a surprising margin.

His 2,521 votes on the fourth and final ballot gave him 54.7 per cent of the total, eclipsing Ignatieff by more than 400 votes.

Ignatieff, the longtime front-runner with the impressive organizational machine and eye-popping international resume, was gracious in defeat.

"We have chosen a man of principle, a man with vision, a man with courage, a man with conviction," Ignatieff said of Dion.

"He will have my entire support."

But notwithstanding Dion's sustained pitch as the candidate of Liberal party unity, his leadership immediately revealed some yawning chasms.

Francophone Liberals openly acknowledged he faces some major perception problems in Quebec, where his uncompromising and acerbic attacks on sovereigntist bromides have not won him applause.

Dion's stilted English and earnest manner also didn't inspire confidence in some delegates who preferred more urbane and garrulous options.

One dour Ignatieff supporter was heard loudly talking on his cell phone while Dion delivered his victory address: "Well, Harper just won a majority," the delegate barked into the phone.

Dion certainly won't rank among the most charismatic of federal Liberal leaders. He's the 11th in the party's history, and its third in a row from Quebec.

But he was deemed by Liberal delegates as the best in an eight-candidate field that all carried some political liabilities.

He received a huge boost after Saturday's second ballot when fourth-place Gerard Kennedy - who had entered the convention in third - crossed the jammed hall to join forces.

It was one of a dozen such alliances that formed and re-formed on the convention floor and its cavernous back hallways over two days.

And while pundits and rival leadership camps alike were claiming Kennedy couldn't possibly carry his almost 900 delegates with him to Dion, the fact remains that Dion's support jumped by 908 votes on the third ballot.

The owlish former environment minister was suddenly in the lead.

"Hey, I'm the front-runner now," Dion told reporters with a huge, crooked grin on his face.

In the end it was a stunning victory and many partisans sprayed across the back of the hall didn't appear to know how to react.

Some were in tears. Many were sullen.

Dion's candidacy was treated as something of a joke in his native Quebec when he threw his hat in the ring last spring. But he gradually emerged as the consensus candidate in a field of intriguing but politically flawed characters.

Ignatieff, despite his towering academic reputation, was hobbled by repeated campaign gaffes that reflected his political inexperience.

He was pilloried for appearing callous about Lebanese casualties during the summer conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, then put in the stocks again when he overcompensated by accusing the Israeli military of war crimes.

His enthusiastic endorsement of "officializing" Quebec's status as a nation, including musing aloud about constitutional arrangements, made many longtime Liberals cringe.

Rae, the solid second-place candidate coming into Montreal, had the baggage of his past NDP affiliation, complete with a bruising term as premier of Ontario during a recession in the early 1990s.

Kennedy, the youngest candidate in the race, struggled with the French language and was considered too green after holding only social portfolios in Ontario's Liberal cabinet.

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