It is not easy for a political leader to stay in the public eye while Parliament is not sitting. Grabbing a bit of attention becomes even more onerous if you lack the advantage of being in power.

In the past week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has taken on a number of events, everything from a barbecue in Edmonton to his four-nation tour of Latin America and the Caribbean, which wraps up Friday.

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, for his part, is not just sitting around: he attended a town hall session in Halifax earlier in the week and today held a news conference in Mississauga to discuss the manufacturing sector.

The prime minister gets daily television coverage; Mr. Dion, however, received scant attention from the electronic media.

But what about print media and the internet? In an unscientific survey of Google’s news search engine, here is how the leaders fared for their efforts over the past seven days:

• Harper, 4,335 mentions
• Dion, 1,000 mentions

As for the other leaders, the NDP’s Jack Layton held one event in the past week. That translated into 509 mentions. (He also received a fair bit of press on the CBCNews.ca website as readers weighed in on the NDP's pitch to strip Conrad Black of his Order of Canada citation.)

The Bloc's Gilles Duceppe received four mentions, with no public events. The Green party's leader, Elizabeth May, also held no public events but elicited 145 mentions, some of them having to do with the resignation of a party rival.

For comparisons sake, the Toronto Blue Jays managed 6,162 mentions in the same time period. Obviously it is easier to be one of the Boys of Summer than a politician in summer.