But in an interview with Maclean’s, the largest Canadian newsmagazine, the new Mrs. MacKay said she will remain her own person politically, even if that does clash with her husband’s role as a leader of the Canadian Conservative Party.
“If I have views that differ from what the government is doing, I will vocalize them,” she said. “I am my own person.”
Afshin-Jam, 32, said she and her 46-year-old husband plan to have children, and to make MacKay’s farm in Lorne, Nova Scotia, their primary residence. Afshin-Jam said she plans to be a “hands-on mom” who uses her work to teach her children “the importance of giving back.”
The couple married January 4 at a chapel inside a resort in Los Cabos, Mexico.
“I’ll never forget that moment,” Afshin-Jam recalled. “Peter looked so handsome. I saw a [glint] in his eyes.”
There were plenty of sentimental touches: on the altar, amid candles, were photos of their grandparents, all of whom have died, including Afshin-Jam’s maternal grandmother, who passed away recently; shoes the grandmother had bought to wear to the wedding were tucked inside a pew.
MacKay’s long-time pastor, Glen Matheson from Nova Scotia, performed the ceremony. “It was magical. There’s no other way to describe it,” Matheson told Maclean’s. “I’ve conducted more than 1,000 marriages in my career, but nothing compares.” The couple rode in a gold carriage and enjoyed an oceanside reception under moonlight.
Maclean’s commented, “Afshin-Jam is now a political spouse the likes of which Canada has never seen.”
She has spoken on human rights at the UN in Geneva, arranged rallies in New York to protest Iran’s president, and rescued children from execution. She has also competed in international beauty contests and graced the pages of Vanity Fair. Her musical recordings have landed on the Billboard charts.
“Little Miss Perfect,” Britain’s Telegraph called Afshin-Jam in 2007, adding: “Surely Afshin-Jam isn’t really as good as she seems—or is she?”
But how will she be as the wife of a politician. Everyone assumes that MacKay will bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party when Prime Minister Stephen Harper retires and then press on to become Canada’s prime minister. MacKay has never denied that ambition.
Afshin-Jam was just a baby when her family escaped Tehran. Her father, Afshin, had been tortured and sentenced to death for allowing music, alcohol and dancing at the Tehran hotel he managed. The father fled to Spain; two months later, Afshin-Jam, her mother, Jaleh, and older sister, Naz, followed. In 1981, the family emigrated to Vancouver.
She says her passion for justice was ignited after seeing the scars her father sustained at the hands of his interrogators. Afshin-Jam, a Christian like her mother, excelled in school, started a global issues club, never partied, and achieved the highest rank in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, becoming a pilot.
After graduating with a BA in political science from the University of British Columbia in 2000, Afshin-Jam began working as a Red Cross youth educator. But talks on land mines and poverty were limited to schoolchildren. She wanted a wider audience. “At that stage I realized people were listening more to Angelina Jolie and Bono than their own politicians,” she told The Telegraph of London in 2007. “I decided, ‘I’m going to get a title for myself.’ ”
In 2003, Afshin-Jam won the Miss World Canada competition, then represented Canada in China at the global finals, where she came in second. “It’s about owning one’s sexuality. I can wear what I want, I can sing what I want, I can show my skin, and why shouldn’t I?” she said. Afshin-Jam went along with the pageant fluff, knowing it would pay off: “My beauty meant I was able to bring attention to a cause. It’s calculated so that people get the message about human rights.”
Over the next few years, Afshin-Jam traveled widely, raising funds and awareness for causes ranging from the victims of the tsunami in India and Sri Lanka to the earthquake in Iran.
In 2006, wanting to broaden her appeal, Afshin-Jam began recording a music album—complete with sexy videos—with her brother-in-law, Peter Karroll. Then she heard about Nazanin Fatehi, an 18-year-old Iranian woman on death row for stabbing her rapist to death. Afshin-Jam launched the “Save Nazanin” campaign, lobbying the Canadian government, European Parliament and Iran. She collected 350,000 signatures on a petition she presented to the UN. Months later, Fateh was released.
From there, Afshin-Jam established the non-profit Stop Child Executions, which focuses on teenagers facing execution in Iran. She also took part in international efforts to liberate imprisoned Iranians, including the University of Toronto’s Ramin Jahanbegloo, who spent four months in a Tehran prison in 2006. He credits Afshin-Jam with helping mobilize the international pressure that resulted in his release. He said, “Of course having a pretty face is an asset. But Nazanin is a true civic actor, not just some benefactor as we sometimes see with Hollywood stars.”
In March 2007, Nazanin was invited to speak to the House of Commons subcommittee on international human rights, where she urged the Canadian government to pursue more targeted sanctions, and called on Canada to take “the middle ground” in opposing President Ahmadi-nejad, one, she says, that resists the “extreme” proposal for military intervention.
Her comments apparently impressed Prime Minister Harper; a year later, he appointed her to the Canadian Race Relations Foundation’s board of directors. By then, she had met MacKay in his then-post of foreign affairs minister, occasionally reaching out to him for help when she heard a child was about to be executed in Iran. MacKay would respond with condemnation of Iran’s actions.
“I was impressed,” she told Maclean’s. “He wasn’t a talker, he was a doer.” In 2010, she moved to Ottawa and began dating MacKay that year. “Over time,” she said, “I [came] to know the true Peter, away from the spotlight of politics and media.”
Maclean’s calls them “a curious couple” with Afshin-Jam standing for Canada’s cosmopolitan future, while MacKay is “a walking tie” to its Scots-Anglo past—the privileged son of a Nova Scotia power broker whose political ascension occurred as if preordained. MacKay’s father, Elmer, served in the federal cabinets of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in the 1980s. The younger MacKay arrived in Ottawa at the of 32 and within six years was the leader of the Conservative Party, which at that point had fallen on hard times and become a minor party.
His had a central role in uniting the Conservative Party with the Canadian Alliance and creating the new Conservative Party that now leads Canada.