John McCallum has refused to confirm whether he will take over as interim leader of the Liberals, after a disastrous election campaign that saw the party lose 19 seats in the House of Commons.
Stephane Dion, who has not spoken publicly since being defeated in his bid to become prime minister, will hold a press conference Monday afternoon and is expected to announce his decision to step down.
Â鶹´«Ã½ reported on Saturday that senior Liberal officials have chosen McCallum, the party's finance critic, to take the reins of the party until the next leadership convention.
However McCallum refused to comment on the issue when asked on CTV's Question Period on Sunday.
"I have far too much respect for my leader, and sympathy for the character assassination (Dion) suffered under the Conservatives to speculate in any way whatsoever about being the interim leader," McCallum said.
"He is our leader, he will be the one who will make a statement tomorrow and I will not say anything at all."
CTV's Craig Oliver said McCallum was chosen because he is bilingual, an authority on finance and well-regarded by the Liberal caucus.
"He's thought of as a consensual interim leader, he's not going to be flying off on his own making decisions that they can't support," Oliver said Saturday.
'A lot of things broken'
Three young Liberal MPs also appeared on Question Period, and commented on where the party must go to rebuild from popular vote numbers that dropped to near-historic lows.
Newly-elected Quebec MP Justin Trudeau, who said he would not be running for any leadership role if Dion does step aside on Monday, cautioned that a change of leadership is not a political cure-all.
"A lot of people are jumping on the idea that we need to change leadership and that will suddenly fix everything," Trudeau said. "There are a lot of things broken in the Liberal party.
"There is a lot of rebuilding to do on party unity, on learning how to fundraise properly (and) reaching out to the grassroots and rebuilding an organization."
New Brunswick MP Dominic Leblanc agreed with Trudeau that a new leader won't fix all the problems the Liberals now face.
"The rebuilding exercise doesn't start with just changing the siding on the house, we have to go back to the basement and look at a number of factors."
Leblanc said one of those problems is that there needs to be a better team atmosphere within the party to succeed.
"Liberals across the country are fed up ... with us shooting at ourselves," he said. "If we want to behave like winners and act like winners, we have to stop this anonymous source or people questioning the leader every time something doesn't happen. It looks very amateurish."
Leblanc also declined to answer if he would be interested in running for the leadership of the party, saying that the Liberal tradition was loyalty to the leader and he would wait for Dion's decision on Monday.
"It's very premature to do a post-mortem on the leadership and the Liberal party will need to show more maturity than we've seen over the past couple of weeks," Leblanc said.
Newfoundland MP Scott Andrews said Dion has been a very good leader but it was time for the party to look forward.
"We need to ... take a second look at where we've come from and we need to move forward shortly," Andrews said. "We need to move on with some new leadership."
