Compassionate brother draws on suits, social media and spirituality
OTTAWA — Jagmeet Singh was barely out of his teens when he took his little brother in.
A biology student at the University of Western Ontario, Singh insisted on looking after Gurratan, then 15, following a nearly violent confrontation with their father that prompted a police call to their farmhouse in Windsor, Ont.
The change was a blessing for both, offering a stable environment for the younger sibling and a chance for the two to reconnect.
“I was getting a little bit frightened, quite frankly, and anxious being at home. And he kind of, at the perfect moment, took me off to London, Ont. I think he was very sensitive to the fact that he didn’t want me to feel those emotions again,” said Gurratan, now a lawmaker in the Ontario legislature.
The duo lived there for three years along with their German shepherd, Jugnu, with college friends popping in and out via the balcony across from a nearby mall to walk the dog unprompted while Singh worked three jobs, Gurratan said.
“He’s a really great cook now, but back then he wasn't the best,” his brother recalled. "I remember one time I was really hungry. He passed me this plate of pasta, and it’s all these chopped-up veggie dogs. “I was like, ‘What is this, man?’ But he was trying his best. He was trying to do what he’s always done: make the best out of a tough situation.”
The same might be said of the current election campaign.
Jagmeet Singh consistently enjoys the highest net favourability ratings of any federal leader and has a record to run on after nearly four years as leader of the federal NDP, but his prospects of returning New Democrats to the official Opposition status they achieved in 2011 appear a long way off.
Having been reduced to 44 seats in the 2015 election that returned the Liberals to power under Justin Trudeau, the NDP managed to send just 24 MPs to the House of Commons in 2019.
That smaller caucus nonetheless wielded some influence in the minority Parliament, securing enhanced pandemic benefits and paid sick leave in exchange for supporting the throne speech. Days before Trudeau visited the Governor General, Singh wrote the prime minister a letter accusing him of breeding cynicism for telling Canadians that a minority government cannot work.
Nonetheless, he treads the campaign trail with a smile, inviting comparisons to the “happy warrior” persona of venerated former NDP leader Jack Layton. His gait is a confident stride, a slower version of the catwalk struts he’s trotted out at fashion shows and gala fundraisers in recent years.
At an Ottawa coffee shop, Singh, 42, displays the selective style for which he’s become known: a maroon polo made by British Columbia’s Reigning Champ, jeans from Montreal's Naked and Famous Denim, and an artisanally crafted kirpan — a ceremonial Sikh dagger — cut from spalted maple by a knifemaker in Cobourg, Ont.
The GQ-esque esthetics might seem at odds with the working-class voters traditionally courted by the NDP. But he’s described his fashion sense as a kind of armour against racial prejudice, a form of cladding that dates back to his time as a criminal defence lawyer in the mid-2000s in Brampton, Ont.
Born in east Toronto and raised in Windsor, Ont., after an early childhood in Newfoundland, Singh’s father, who comes from a village in India's Punjab region, rose to become head of the psychiatry department at a Windsor hospital. He also suffered from a debilitating addiction to alcohol.
“The hardest decision in my life was when I had to say, “Pops, you can’t live here anymore. You can’t live in a place where you're hurting people,’” Singh recalls.
Nonetheless, he cites his dad's trajectory as “an incredible inspiration.”
“His story is really human. It’s not that everything was always good. He had amazing highs and amazing lows, but he came back.”
Singh, whose wife, Gurkiran Kaur Sidhu, is expecting their first child, has faced his own ups and downs.
In elementary school he dealt with racism and confronted bullies with words and fists, his younger brother said.
His first stab at federal politics saw him lose in 2011.
But overall, Singh’s achievement chart has notched upward, fuelled by a sense of empathy-infused social justice.
He tapped that resource as a member of provincial parliament between 2011 and 2017, and more recently as federal party leader, to sound off on affordability, universal pharmacare and a tax-the-rich populism.
Years earlier at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School, he embraced a more structural view of social ills.
“He had very definite ideas about the problems with the way the law currently functioned and the necessity of changing those. And in the space of criminal law, I think a lot of that was about police behaviour and over-policing and racism,” said Sonia Lawrence, one of Singh’s professors.
The Burnaby South MP has an outsized presence on social media. One TikTok post last month encouraging young people to vote as Singh grooves to a viral remix garnered 6.2 million views.
"He knows how to target us," said Mathios Felmina, 26. “It’s super impressive that he actually knows how to cook injera, which is my cultural meal’ — a spongy, fermented flatbread common in Ethiopia and Somalia.