VANCOUVER — Maurizio Bevilacqua is standing beside a photocopier in the tiny reception area of the Liberal Party of Canada's B.C. headquarters.

As a handful of mostly young party workers nibble catered sushi, the former junior cabinet minister in Jean Chretien's government delivers a little speech he's probably made in some form dozens of times since joining the crowded Liberal leadership race.

"I entered this race because the future matters to me and the responsibility of any leader is to prepare a country for the future," he says. "Anybody can address immediate issues."

It's a pitch for support, but Bevilacqua adds a plea that whoever these people support at the Montreal leadership convention in December, their underlying loyalty should be to the Liberal party.

The message: Look what happened when we Liberals put the boots to each other.

"One of the reasons we lost the last election was because not everybody was on board," said Bevilacqua in an interview during a campaign swing through British Columbia. "So the next leader has to be a person who can bring the diverse groups of the party together, and I know I can.

"My prediction is that if the party does not come out of the convention united, it will not win the next election. Unity is a must."

None of the 10 other declared candidates are likely to argue with him but Bevilacqua bears the scars of that infighting.

First elected at age 28 in his suburban Toronto riding of North York by only 77 votes in 1988, he saw the victory overturned in court before handily winning a byelection in 1990.

He's won every election since, including the Liberals' 1993 landslide when he took his riding by 51,088 votes, the largest margin in Canadian history.

But as an early supporter of Paul Martin's losing leadership bid in 1990, Bevilacqua was viewed with suspicion by Chretien supporters, making it into cabinet in junior portfolios only in 2002.

But even when Martin finally forced Chretien out the following year, Bevilacqua was kept out of cabinet after reportedly running afoul of loyalists in Martin's inner circle. He says he has no regrets.

"It's a price that I was willing to pay because I think that party unity is extremely important," he says. "I think that many Liberals, after the results of the last election, have also come to the same conclusion."

A key supporter of Bevilacqua's candidacy says his reputation as an uncomplaining toiler in the political trenches is helping in a race that includes higher-profile party newcomers such as former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae, former Conservative MP Scott Brison and scholar Michael Ignatieff, a longtime expatriate.

"He's clearly going to surprise a lot of people," says party pollster and strategist Michael Marzolini, CEO of Pollara. "He's got a good organization."

Liberal leadership convention outcomes have been pre-ordained since John Turner beat Chretien in 1984, he says. That set the stage for the runner-up to plot comebacks, as Chretien did in 1990 and Martin in 2003, with all their attendant settling of scores.

Bevilacqua said that kept a lot of Liberal supporters and campaign workers at home in the last election.

"I warned people five years prior to Mr. Martin taking office that if in fact this issue would not have been solved that there would be consequences," says Bevilacqua.

But this race remains essentially wide open, with none of the candidates taking large support margins to the convention, says Marzolini.

"Whoever wins this thing is going to be going to Montreal with 11 to 15 per cent, maybe possibly 20 per cent of the party behind him," he says. "There's no establishment wisdom here. There's no candidate that anybody has anointed."

Bevilacqua carries no baggage from those years, Marzolini says, but he does marry some of the two previous leaders' better attributes.

He chaired the Commons finance committee and takes some credit for Martin's successful fight against the deficit. And he has Chretien's grasp of how important the middle ground is in Canadian politics, the pollster says.

"He's willing to say we want the best social programs in the world but they need to be paid for," Marzolini says. "That's a revelation to a lot of Liberals who just think we have to spend a larger and larger percentage every year."

Bevilacqua also sees himself as the embodiment of both a generational change in Canadian politics - he's 46 - and the immigrant experience that's changing the face of Canada.

He emigrated with his family from Sulmona, in central Italy's Abruzzi region, in 1970. His truck-driver father and seamstress mother bootstrapped the family into the middle class and their children into university.

"I went through the experience of living in the basement of a home and 10 years later being in the House of Commons, which is a real tribute to the openness of our society," Bevilacqua says.

The next few weeks leading up to the July 1 cut-off date for selling party memberships will be crucial for the candidates. Some may add their tallies and bail out.

"We're pretty confident we'll be competitive because of the national organization that we have," Bevilacqua says.