OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper will use his first major speech on the current recession Tuesday to cast Canada as a comparative bright light in a world beset by economic gloom.

Harper will deliver that relatively buoyant message in a bleak time and place: in southern Ontario's car country, one week after the latest deluge of grim economic data.

The speech is part of a broader shift in strategy for the prime minister.

Some of his own Conservative MPs had been grumbling that Harper had not been visible enough while Canadians fretted about the future, but he stepped up his public appearances in recent weeks.

Harper took on a more prominent role after the Jan. 27 federal budget and has been visiting various pockets of the country to make stimulus-funding announcements.

He spent this past weekend at his official residence typing away at Tuesday's address -- one of the rare occasions on which Harper has written a speech from start to finish.

His 3,000-word address to the Brampton Board of Trade will be the most elaborate speech he has delivered this year on the state of the economy.

"It is a positive message," said Harper spokesman Kory Teneycke.

"The global economy is suffering what may be the worst combination of bad news since the 1930s -- yet Canada has, in relative terms, been immune from some of the worst aspects of this.

"And those elements of our economy that are being hit, are being hit to a lesser degree than other countries."

Canada actually lost more jobs per capita than the United States last month, but the job losses began piling up far earlier in the U.S. and the unemployment rate there remains higher.

Harper hopes the message he trumpets -- that it's better here than elsewhere -- will resonate in the ears of Canadian voters.

He will bring a visual aid in the form of Power Point charts to illustrate his case.

Those figures will show that while Canada's economy declined 3.4 percentage points in December, it dropped 6.2 per cent in the U.S., 6 per cent in Europe, 12.7 per cent in Japan, and 10 per cent in Mexico.

And while Canada's federal budget deficit is the largest the country has posted since the mid-1990s it is, per capita, roughly one-sixth as big as the projected deficit in the U.S.

The opposition Liberals argued that the prime minister's own actions have undermined the economy.

They noted that Harper called an unnecessary election in September, then during the October campaign denied an impending deficit, and finally presented a fiscal update in November devoid of a stimulus package.

"This government's record on the economy speaks for itself," said Liberal spokeswoman Jill Fairbrother. "Mr. Harper's failure to take action up to this point has cost Canada thousands of jobs. If Mr. Harper believes we've seen the bottom of this crisis, he's misreading the economy as he did last fall when he told Canadians this wouldn't happen to us at all."

But Harper will argue that smart government decisions in recent years, on bank regulation and tax cuts, have helped soften the economic impact on Canadians.

"We are doing the best of the industrialized world right now," Teneycke said.

"We entered the global recession later than most other countries -- and its effect has not been as deep."

The speech locale was chosen because southern Ontario's manufacturing sector has been particularly hard-hit by the current recession, Teneycke said.

Brampton has a Chrysler plant that employs 3,500 people. Although it remains open, the plant was recently idled for a week.