May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Canada’s Liberal Party meets in Vancouver this weekend to name a descendent of Russian nobility, Michael Ignatieff, as its next leader. The choice of the western venue was no coincidence.

To defeat Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Ignatieff -- an author, former professor and diplomat’s son -- must improve his party’s performance in western and rural Canada. His predecessor, Stephane Dion, led the party to its worst-ever showing last year.

“The Bible says a wise farmer sows his seeds in fertile ground and we know where the more fertile areas are for us,” said David Smith, a Liberal senator who helped recruit Ignatieff from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “There are issues that are pretty relevant to farmers where we’re on the right side of things.”

The Liberals hold seven of 92 districts in the four western provinces after Dion’s plans for an energy tax alienated farmers and oil-rich provinces. Ignatieff, 61, dropped many of Dion’s policies and is reaching out to western and rural voters, vowing to regain their “trust and confidence.”

While 45 percent of Canada’s population lives in the country’s six biggest cities and 80 percent are located in urban areas, the country’s “first-past-the-post” electoral system means the Liberals can’t gain seats in Parliament unless they branch out into rural areas.

Moving West

In Ontario and Quebec, which account for 181 of the 308 electoral districts, the Liberals were reduced to two seats outside metropolitan regions, such as Montreal and Toronto.

“We’ve got to be where the action is,” Ignatieff said in a March 24 interview. “The key fact about Canada is that the economic center is moving westward.”

The decision to hold the meeting in Vancouver “will energize our grassroots in a region of the country which has never hosted a Liberal leadership convention,” Doug Ferguson, head of the party, said on Nov. 8.

During a Feb. 25 speech in Ottawa to the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, which represents 200,000 farmers, Ignatieff made an emphatic plea.

“We understand rural Canadians because many of us started our lives in rural Canada and want to sustain that connection,” he said. “We need to get back to that connection that our party used to have with rural Canada.”

Harper, 50, won last year’s election with 38 percent of the vote, compared with 26 percent for the Liberals. Because the Conservatives got less than a majority of seats, opposition parties can combine their votes in Parliament to topple the government on matters of confidence, such as the budget.

308 Seats

A Harris-Decima poll of 2,000 Canadians, conducted April 8 to April 19, gave Ignatieff’s Liberals 32 percent support, compared with 29 percent for the Conservatives. The poll’s margin of error was 2.2 percentage points.

Ignatieff has adopted a plan, modeled after the “50-State Strategy” employed by the U.S. Democratic Party last year, that calls for his party to battle in all 308 districts.

As prime minister, Ignatieff would likely be more comfortable than Harper with budget deficits, seek a bigger role in international forums, improve relations with China, and accept tougher environmental rules, said Nelson Wiseman, a University of Toronto political scientist.

Cocktail Circuit

To avoid Dion’s fate -- he was the first Liberal leader in over a century not to become prime minister -- Ignatieff needs to guard against his opponents’ efforts to portray him as being out-of-touch with Canadians, said Denis Smith, who wrote a biography of Ignatieff in 2006.

The Conservatives caricatured Dion as a weak leader after he took the job in 2006. Ignatieff spent more than half of his life abroad before launching his political career. His time in academia abroad may become more of a liability than an asset.

“Ignatieff’s most obvious weakness is his urbane personality -- this cerebral guy who’s more in touch with the cocktail circuit than average Canadians,” said Dimitri Pantazopoulos, a Conservative pollster in Ottawa. “It restricts Ignatieff to urban Canada and pushes him further back toward his base.”

Lawmaker Keith Martin, one of the few Liberals from Western Canada, rejects that analysis. “People have similar problems and I don’t think you need to spend time shoveling cow manure to understand the needs in rural areas,” Martin said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alexandre Deslongchamps in Ottawa at adeslongcham@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 1, 2009 00:00 EDT