Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has nominated the first person of color to Canada’s top court.
Mahmud Jamal has a Judge in an Ontario Court of Appeal since 2019, after teaching at two of Canada’s highly ranked law schools and worked for many years as a litigator.
While talking about Jamal’s nomination, Trudeau tweeted: “He’ll be a valuable asset to the Supreme Court – and that’s why, today, I’m announcing his historic nomination to our country’s highest court.”
Jamal was born in 1967 into an Indian family in Nairobi and was brought up in Britain before relocating to Canada in 1981.
He said in a job questionnaire that his hybrid religion, cultural upbringing as well as his experiences in Canada – and of his wife – “exposed me to some of the challenges and aspirations of immigrants, religious minorities, and racialized persons.”
He wrote: “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 color of my skin.”
According to him, his wife immigrated to Canada from Iran during the 1979 revolution to escape the persecution of the Baha’i religious minority.
He said: “After we married, I became a Baha’i, attracted by the faith’s message of the spiritual unity of humankind, and we raised our two children in Toronto’s multi-ethnic Baha’i community.”
Jamal will succeed Justice Rosalie Abella, the nine-person court’s longest serving justice who is due for retirement on July 1.
