The tone of the mainstream press also began to change as she became an increasingly visible presence in the party. In January 2008, Dhalla’s glamorous image took a hit when an aide’s purse was snatched by child thieves during an official tour of India’s Punjab region. A local reporter witnessed the theft and jumped on his motorbike to pursue the crooks—an 11-year-old boy named Sachin and his nine-year-old sister Binda. The journalist recovered the bag and turned his camera on the scene as police arrived to arrest the pair. The images he captured of Sachin being dragged along the ground by cops, then later lying in the back seat of a patrol car, apparently semi-conscious, while his crying sister pleaded with the authorities, touched off a firestorm. So did the quote from Dhalla that ran alongside the pictures in Indian papers: “I cannot control what the police do and I hope that those young kids learn from this incident.”
The MP’s response quickly became the story in India (“shockingly callous,” tutted Times Now, a Mumbai-based TV network) as well as back home in Canada. For her part, Dhalla said she was unaware of the circumstances of the arrest when she gave the interview. “I was completely, completely unaware of the type of treatment these young children were subjected to,” she told the CBC. And she called for an official investigation into the officers’ conduct. Despite promises at the time, that doesn’t appear to have happened: no charges were ever laid against the police, and the children and their family quickly disappeared. The woman whose purse was stolen, Seema Bhayana, then Dhalla’s executive assistant and now working as an immigration consultant in the riding, did not respond to interview requests.
But the story that the media, and the public, can’t get enough of is Dhalla’s ongoing feud with the producer of a made-in-Canada Bollywood-style film she starred in back in 2003. Kyon Kis Liye (Why? And For Whom?) was a singing and dancing murder-mystery, loosely based on a real Ontario killing where a husband poisoned his wife and tried to collect the insurance money. Dhalla plays the female lead, a police officer investigating the crime. The low-budget effort was the brainchild of Charanjit “Chico” Shira, the owner of a Hamilton autobody shop and a Liberal supporter. He also starred, as well as fixing the cars used in the film’s chase and crash scenes.
Dhalla happily promoted the movie when it premiered in 2003 (with $13,000 of federal money, courtesy of then-local MP and heritage minister Sheila Copps), but later changed her tune. In her 2004 campaign, someone tried to use the film to smear her, sending excerpts to media outlets along with a note claiming it had been banned by Indian censors for its explicit love scenes. (It wasn’t, and there is nothing racier than some fully clothed wrestling between Dhalla and her co-star.)
This past fall, when Shira announced plans to market a DVD version of the film, he heard from the MP’s lawyer. Dhalla said that she never consented to its release and claimed that its publicity materials “put my face on someone else’s body, in clothes I never wore.” (In May 2003, she told the Winnipeg Free Press something different—that her body had been slightly digitally altered. “They’ve contoured my body a bit. In India, thin is not as in.”)
In an interview last week, Shira told Maclean’s that at a face-to-face meeting in Brampton, Dhalla’s family offered him money not to release the film. The concern expressed by the MP, her uncle, brother and mother, says Shira, was that it would somehow offend her socially conservative immigrant constituents. “ ‘If the film comes out they will think I’m a movie star,’ she told me,” says the producer. “But I said I will never stop my film at any price. I am proud of it and it’s my baby.” (Dhalla’s uncle confirmed the meeting took place, but denied that there were any discussions about cash.) And when the first copies of the DVD arrived in Canada on the weekend, just in time to cash in on the nanny scandal, Shira went public with claims that the love scene used to smear Dhalla back in 2004 has somehow mysteriously disappeared from the film. “I am having my lawyer in India look into this,” he told the Toronto Sun, adding that a confidential source had told him “someone in Canada paid a lot of money to have it taken out.”
Despite her glamourpuss image, Dhalla knows a thing or two about the bare-knuckle aspects of politics. During last fall’s federal campaign, she hardly missed an opportunity to remind Brampton voters that the brother of her Conservative opponent Parm Gill had been charged with mischief for vandalizing her lawn signs during the 2006 election. (The charges were later dropped.) And when it comes to the current nanny storm, it is already clear that she intends to use every tool in her basket to fight them.
Howard Levitt, her lawyer—who represented Yolanda Ballard, the companion of the late Toronto Maple Leafs owner, in a long-running dispute with his estate, and served as legal counsel to Jean Chrétien’s successful 1990 leadership bid—waved about several documents at her press conference that he claims disprove the allegations. (The documents have not been made available to the media.) And Dhalla is now busy painting herself as the victim. In her testimony before the Commons’ immigration committee Tuesday, the MP pointed to contacts between her accusers, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney, and her Conservative challenger Gill. She wondered aloud if the caregivers—all citizens of the Philippines, in Canada on temporary work permits—were using her name in a bid to gain permanent residency. She came close to tears as she related her own battles on behalf of immigrants. “These women that spoke today: these are the women that I am trying to help,” said Dhalla. “Every initiative I’ve championed in my riding . . . it’s these women I’m trying to help, and I’ve sacrificed my whole life for.”
