Ruby Dhalla may have caught the “political bug” as a young child, but she likely had no idea just how messy political life could get.
Dhalla was born in 1974, and raised in a poor neighbourhood in Winnipeg, Man., by a single mother who had arrived from Punjab, India, two years before.
Her mother worked as a bookkeeper and child care worker to raise Dhalla and her brother Neil, and made the children watch the news on television each night before going to bed.
At the age of ten, Dhalla saw a news report about the massacre at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, and was captivated by the report. She wrote a letter to the late prime minister of India Indira Gandhi, urging her to pursue a peaceful solution.
Two weeks after the letter was sent, Dhalla received a personalized letter from Gandhi, inviting Dhalla to visit India.
Dhalla and her family were in London en route to India to visit Gandhi when she was assassinated in New Delhi on October 31, 1984. She credits the entire experience as being the catalyst of her interest in politics.
Dhalla was a junior high school and high school president. At the age of 12, she participated in a program called Forum for Young Canadians, which required that she get a $100 donation from her local MP.
She went to visit MP David Walker, who agreed to provide the donation, on the condition that Dhalla volunteer for the Liberal party. Every Saturday for the next year, Dhalla volunteered her time for the party by answering phones and attending events.
She volunteered for David Walker’s campaign to win the parliamentary seat for Winnipeg North Centre in 1988, and became an active member of the Young Liberals.
Academic career
She started her studies at the University of Winnipeg, but her academic career was briefly sidetracked while on a natural sciences scholarship exchange at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
Dhalla began to work as a model, and finished second in the Miss India Canada pageant in 1993.
She returned to Manitoba and graduated from the University of Winnipeg in 1995 with a degree in biochemistry with a minor in political science.
She moved back to Toronto and obtained her Doctor of Chiropractic medicine in 1999, before opening a number of chiropractic clinics in the GTA with her brother.
But Dhalla was again drawn to pursue modelling and acting. She appeared in a Hindi film made in Hamilton in 2003 called Kyon Kis Liye (Why? And for Whom?). She continued to model, and appeared in television commercials.
In 2004, then Prime Minister Paul Martin approached Dhalla and asked her to represent the Liberals in the next election. She accepted, and won the Brampton-Springdale seat, becoming the first Sikh woman in the House of Commons.
Controversy
Dhalla had her first taste of controversy on a trip to India in January 2008. Two children were beaten by police after an aide’s purse was stolen, and the Indian media portrayed Dhalla as uncaring. Dhalla responded with a statement condemning violence.
In March of 2009, Dhalla was attempting to block sales of DVD copies of her movie Kyon Kis Liye, saying her face was placed on someone else’s body in the movie’s publicity material.
The producer of the film, an auto body shop owner in Hamilton, countered with a claim that Dhalla had conspired to alter scenes from pirated copies of the DVD to remove scenes she didn’t like.
The latest controversy of Dhallas’s career involves recent allegations that she illegally hired and employed three foreign caregivers in her family’s home in Mississauga, Ont.
Dhalla resigned as Critic for Youth and Multiculturalism, and has appeared before the Commons immigration committee to defend herself. She claims the allegations are part of a conspiracy to end her political career.
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