Ali Ehsassi and Majid Jowhari both won election to the Canadian House of Commons Monday, becoming the first Iranians ever to win a federal election in either the United States or Canada.
The victories make Ehsassi and Jowhari the highest-ranking elected officials of Iranian heritage in North America.
And the pair didn’t just win seats by beating anybody; both men defeated other Iranians!
Ehsassi and Jowhari rode to victory as part of the Liberal Party sweep that made Justin Trudeau the new prime minister of Canada, ousting Stephen Harper, who has made hostility to the Islamic Republic a trademark of his foreign policy.
Both men represent federal “ridings”—the Canadian term for a legislative district—in the Toronto metropolitan area. Ehsassi represents Willowdale and Jowhari won in Richmond Hill, the town just north of Toronto with the largest concentration of Iranian immigrants in Canada.
Liberals easily swept most of the ridings in the Toronto metropolitan area, where 15 percent of all Canadians live. The Liberals won 46 seats in the area while the Conservatives won a mere six and no other party won any.
But in Richmond Hill, Jowhari was trailing Conservative candidate Michael Parsa—a Tehran-born man who came to Canada when he was 10—as the tallies starting coming in, then the race see-sawed between the two Iranians much of the night before Jowhari inched ahead to win by 6.6 percentage points.
The crowd at Jowhari’s election night party was elated by how the Liberals fared nationwide, but local campaign staffers were biting their nails as the results trickled in.
This was an open race because, as a newly redrawn riding, incumbent Conservative Costas Menegakis chose to run to the north in the adjoining riding.
In the last federal election in 2011, Menegakis had taken the Richmond Hill riding from the Liberals, who had held the seat for several terms.
The Conservatives were keen to hold the riding, while the Liberals were eager to win it back. Proof of its importance: both Conservative Leader Harper and Liberal Leader Trudeau made stops in the affluent suburban riding.
On the campaign trail, Jowhari and Parsa touted their business backgrounds. Jowhari runs his own management consulting firm. Parsa oversees a family business that sells furniture and mattresses.
The final results put Jowhari in Ottawa.
Liberal—Majid Jowhari
23,032 46.9%
Conservative—Michael Parsa
21,275 43.3%
New Democrat—Adam Devita
3,950 8.0%
Green—Gwendolyn Veenema
856 1.7%
The Conservative candidate lost only 24/100 of a percentage point compared to the election four years ago. The key was what happened in many other ridings across Canada—left of center voters, who four years ago split their votes among the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens, allowing the Conservatives to win, deserted the New Democrats and Greens in droves to vote Liberal. In Richmond Hill, the combined vote for the New Democrats and Greens went from just over 20 percent four years ago to just under 10 percent Monday, lifting Jowhari to victory.
Jowhari owns his own boutique consulting firm, which is located in Richmond Hill, Iridium Management Consulting Group, specializing in financial services. He has been active in the local Chamber of Commerce and, nationally, in the Iranian Canadian Congress and the Iranian Canadian Network.
He came to Canada to attend Ryerson University, from which he got a bachelor’s in industrial engineering. He then got an MBA from York University’s Schulich School of Business. He and his wife, with whom he has two children, have lived in Richmond Hill for 15 years.
Just a short distance away, Ali Ehsassi won an easier victory in the Willowdale riding. He ousted an incumbent Conservative, who was a Chinese-Canadian, and also beat a fellow Iranian, Pouyan Tabasinejad, running on the New Democratic ticket.
Here are the Willowdale results:
Liberal—Ali Ehsassi
24,431 53.2%
Conservative—Chungsen Leung
17,036 37.1%
New Dem.—Pouyan Tabasinejad
3,226 7.0%
Green—James Arruda
1,021 2.2%
Indep—Birinder Singh Ahluwalla
216 0.5%
Ehsassi was born in Geneva, Switzerland, the son of an Iranian diplomat under the Shah.
When he was three, his family moved to New York City, where he was enrolled in the United Nations School. This experience, he says, exposed him to students “from every corner of the world…. You realize all the highlights of those things people share.”
Living in New York during the mid-’70s, he found himself witnessing a society under-going political and social upheaval. The women’s movement was in full swing — and he said his family would discuss it around the dinner table.
“These social movements were exhilarating to watch.”
Being the son of a diplomat meant his family lived a very comfortable life — until the 1979 revolution. He arrived in Toronto when he was 15. ”My parents came here with a couple of suitcases. They had experienced a lot of hardship after the revolution. My focus when we came here was never to look to the past. It was always to look to the future.”
After high school, he went to the University of Toronto, where he became president of The Young Liberals Club.
Ehsassi’s great-grandfather on his maternal side was Abdolhossein Teymourtash, who was the first Minister of Court during the Pahlavi Dynasty.
Despite his family’s political roots, he says it was his educational experiences in school that got him interested in politics. “It’s the intersection of the domestic and the global that interested me.”
After getting his BA in Toronto, he went on to study at the London School of Economics and later at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where he pursued a masters of international trade and arbitration law.
Ehsassi and Jowhari now are part of a vastly rejuvenated Liberal Party that has spent a decade in the political wilderness.
The Canadian left lost three federal elections in a row because of their three-way split among Liberals, New Democrats and Greens. The right took power a decade ago after the unification of their two parties—the far-right Canadian Alliance led by Harper and the center right Progressive Conservatives under Peter MacKay, who recently retired from politics and who is married to Iranian-Canadian Nazanin Afshin-Jam. MacKay’s old seat in Parliament was won by a Liberal Monday.
Ehsassi and Jowhari will be joined in the House of Commons by another Farsi speaker, Maryam Monsef, an Afghan-born woman who won as a Liberal in the Ontario riding of Peterborough-Kawartha.
Iranians have won seats in the Canadian provincial legislatures in Ontario and Quebec and in the Washington state legislature in the United States. But before Ehsassi and Jowhari, no Iranian had ever won a seat in the federal legislature in either country. Goli Ameri was the GOP nominee for a House of Representatives seat in Oregon a decade ago, but lost that election. Most Iranians who hold elective office in North America hold local government positions or judgeships.
The Liberal victory is expected to see major changes in Canadian policy as the Conservatives had recently taken Canada to the right of the US Republican Party while the Liberals have historically stood to the left of the US Democratic Party.
Two issues are Conservative hostility to Iran and what many saw as Harper exploiting fears about Islamic fundamentalism.
The Conservatives imposed sanctions on Iran that mirrored US sanctions. After the United States reached the nuclear agreement with Iran, Canada said it had no plans to curb any of its sanctions policies. That is now likely to change under Trudeau.
The Conservatives had also taken a harsh stand on conservative Islam, with Harper in 2011 forbidding anyone from taking the oath of citizenship while wearing the face-covering niqab. A Canadian court ruled a few months ago that such a policy violated Canada’s Charter of Rights, roughly equivalent to the American Bill of Rights. A few weeks ago, Harper announced that he would appeal that decision to the Supreme Court—intentionally making the niqab an issue in the campaign. Trudeau accused Harper of stoking public fears of Islamic terrorism and is expected to dump the appeal to the Supreme Court and the niqab policy.
Harper did not run against Islam per se. At least four Muslims were Conservative Party candidates in this election. Another 12 Muslims ran as Liberal candidates, nine as candidates for the New Democrats and two on the Green Party ticket.
The Liberal Party held barely 10 percent of the seats in the last Parliament—36 of 338 seats. It won 184 seats Monday. That means many freshmen members are likely to be given posts in the government. What that portends for Ehsassi and Jowhari remains to be seen.