Culture / Justice Mahmud Jamal Becomes The First Person of Colour Nominated To Canada’s Supreme Court

Justice Mahmud Jamal Becomes The First Person of Colour Nominated To Canada’s Supreme Court

Culture Jun 18, 2021

by Hina P. Ansari

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his nomination for the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Mahmud Jamal becomes the first South Asian and person of colour to receive such nomination. Making Trudeau’s motion truly historic.

This nomination is to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella who will be retiring on July 1, 2020, which is also Canada Day and her 75th birthday.

“I know that Justice Jamal, with his exceptional legal and academic experience and dedication to serving others, will be a valuable asset to our country’s highest court,” Trudeau noted in his official statement to the press.

Jamal was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1967 to a family originally from India. His family moved to the U.K. in search of a better life in 1969. In 1981, his family settled in Edmonton, where he attended high school.

Fully bilingual, Jamal was exposed to the various cultures that Canada offered during his upbringing.

His answers in a questionnaire that was part of the vetting process Jamal shared his experience of being raised in a multicultural society. “I was raised at school as a Christian, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and absorbing the values of the Church of England, and at home as a Muslim, memorizing Arabic prayers from the Quran and living as part of the Ismaili community,”

“Like many others, I experienced discrimination as a fact of daily life. As a child and youth, I was taunted and harassed because of my name, religion, or the colour of my skin.”

He became Baha’i when he married his wife who is from Iran. And raised his two children “in Toronto’s multi-ethnic Bahá’í community.”

Jamal noted that he was the first person in his family to attend university. He spent a year at the London School of Economics, and continued his education by getting his economics degree from the University of Toronto. He then went to Montreal to study common law and Quebec civil law at McGill University before getting his graduate law degree from Yale Law School.

“Both Campbell and Justice Minister David Lametti will appear soon before a special hearing of the House of Commons justice committee to discuss the selection process and the reasons for the nomination,” according to the CBC. “Members of the committee will then take part in a question and answer period with Jamal, joined by the members of the Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and a member of the Green Party of Canada. This session will be moderated by Marie-Eve Sylvestre, dean of the Civil Law section at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.”

Main Image Photo Credit: www.cbc.ca

Hina P. Ansari

Author

Hina P. Ansari is a graduate from The University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario). Since then she has carved a successful career in Canada's national fashion-publishing world as the Entertainment/Photo Editor at FLARE Magazine, Canada's national fashion magazine. She was the first South Asian in...

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Justice Mahmud Jamal Becomes The First Person of Colour Nominated To Canada’s Supreme Court

by Hina P. Ansari

Hina P. Ansari

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