Mad about Ruby Dhalla

For a woman who has never met a microphone she didn’t like, it can’t have been easy. Days of enforced silence as her personal reputation, and perhaps political future, were savaged by allegations she and her family illegally employed, then bullied and mistreated, caregivers for her aging mother. Watching the critics pile on, and her federal Liberal colleagues run for cover. And when Ruby Dhalla finally did face the public last week, it wasn’t so much to mount a defence—a task delegated to a pit bull Bay Street lawyer—as plead for more time. “I would once again ask the Canadian public to please hold judgment,” the MP said in her brief remarks before the dozens of cameras and reporters jammed into her Brampton, Ont., constituency office. “Because when the facts and the truth come forward, then I think true victory will be achieved.”

Less than a week before, Dhalla had been basking in her status as one of the Liberal party’s up-and-comers, arriving in a white stretch limo for the Vancouver convention and standing alongside new leader Michael Ignatieff, hoisting his arm in the air as the confetti flew. Now confronted by three former family employees, she finds herself at the centre of a controversy that has mushroomed to enmesh members of the Ontario government, and spark an ethics investigation as well as public hearings before the House of Commons immigration committee. Among the allegations—first aired at a round-table discussion on nannies’ rights attended by two provincial cabinet ministers and later reported in the Toronto Star—are charges that Dhalla seized the passports of the immigrant women hired to help her mother Tavinder, and used her position to try to sidestep the required paperwork. Furthermore, the caregivers allege they were overworked and underpaid, forced to take on tasks like washing cars, shovelling snow and cleaning the chiropractic clinics owned by Dhalla’s brother Neil. The MP has called the allegations against her “false and unsubstantiated,” and maintains that all who know her family recognize “how loving, and caring and compassionate we are.” Her lawyer, Howard Levitt, has gone even further, suggesting there is a political or media conspiracy at play, “a purposeful attempt to destroy [Ms.] Dhalla’s career and credibility,” as he told reporters. “The only question is: who’s really behind them? And who orchestrated, enabled or assisted these former employees of her brother to suddenly come forward?”

But for a woman whose ambitions have been on display since junior high, and who has previously flirted with a run for the reins of the party, the damage may already have been done. At just 35 years of age, Dhalla is one of the most recognizable faces in Canadian politics: a popular speaker at party functions, glamorous enough to stride the red carpet at the Oscars, anointed as the third “hottest” female politician in the world last fall by Maxim magazine. In Ottawa, such notoriety has engendered a typically peevish backlash—in the Hill Times annual survey, colleagues and opponents routinely place her near the top of the list of “sexiest” and “best-dressed” MPs, but also rank her as one of the biggest gossips, and “worst Scrooge to work for.” And it looks like the fatigue might be spreading. Recently, Dhalla has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons: seemingly callous comments about police beating the children who snatched an aide’s purse during a visit to India; a simmering dispute with the producer of a Bollywood-style film she starred in before entering politics; and now the even more toxic nanny allegations. The first South Asian woman elected to Canada’s Parliament (and one of our youngest female MPs ever) is on a bad roll. Her friends and supporters think somebody is out to get Ruby, but the real question might be whether she’s simply doing it to herself.

Ruby Dhalla has the type of backstory that would be rejected as “too unrealistic” if it were attached to a fictional character. But somewhere safely tucked away in their Mississauga home (the MP lives near, but not in her suburban Toronto riding), her mother Tavinder has the scrapbooks that prove it’s all true. The first clippings date back to the summer of 1984, when 10-year-old Ruby made international news for a letter she wrote to Indira Gandhi, urging her to forge peace between India’s Sikhs and Hindus after government troops stormed Punjab’s Sikh Golden Temple, killing hundreds. The Indian prime minister mentioned it at a press conference, and wrote back inviting the little girl and her family to visit. The meeting never happened. First Ruby made the papers again, progressing from childhood celebrity to legend in her native Winnipeg, when she was hit by a car while pulling a younger child from its path. It was October by the time she was well enough to travel. And the family was on a stopover in London, U.K., when Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards that October.

However, the idea that a girl from a poor, single-parent family (Dhalla’s father Nick died when she and her brother were quite young) could make a difference was already firmly entrenched. In Grade 8, she racked up her first election victory—she has yet to lose one—becoming class president at Isaac Newton Junior High. At age 12, she started attending Liberal rallies with her uncle Paul Dhillon, a true partisan, and joined the party. By her first year of high school, she was a regular volunteer in the office of David Walker, the then-newly minted MP for Winnipeg North Centre. “She was just so much more mature and skilled than her peers,” says the former politician, who now has his own Winnipeg consulting firm. “You knew that this was a person who was going to be a star, who was trying hard to be a star.”

When the other kids at Daniel McIntyre High were listening to U2’s Paul “Bono” Hewson, she was hanging out with Paul “Finance Minister” Martin. “[During high school] people would go off and party and I would go to a policy convention,” she told the Star shortly after first winning federal office in 2004.

But Ruby wasn’t just brainy, she was beautiful. While doing her undergrad in biochemistry and political science at the University of Winnipeg, she participated in the 1993 Miss India Canada pageant, placing second behind Ruby Bhatia, now a well-known film and TV star in India. When Dhalla moved to Toronto two years later, modelling gigs helped pay her way through chiropractic college. And in 1999, she even made her own brief stab at a Bollywood career, moving to India and finding work in commercials and as a music-channel veejay. Her practical side won out, however, and she soon returned home to establish a chain of chiropractic clinics with brother Neil.

The doctors Dhalla prospered, buying the pleasant red-brick suburban home they still share—both are unmarried—with their mother. But politics continued to be the focal point of Ruby’s life. She was a national organizer for Paul Martin’s 2003 leadership campaign. And when he decided to go to the polls in June 2004, the new prime minister hand-picked her as his candidate for the new riding of Brampton-Springdale. It wasn’t a widely acclaimed choice. Upset that their favoured candidate, Andrew Kania, a lawyer and backer of Martin’s leadership rival John Manley, had been punted, 12 of the riding association’s 20-member executive formally endorsed Dhalla’s NDP challenger. (Kania won election as the Liberal MP for neighbouring Brampton West in 2008.)