- MacPolitics: Focus On Halifax West: Lena Metlege Diab
By Andrew Macdonald
Once considered a provincial Liberal leadership contender, Lena Metlege Diab is an election warhorse, never losing a campaign.
But, as we report in the next story, a Top Tory challenger could come from a Rob Batherson candidacy.
In order for Batherson to claim victory, if he should run under the Tory ticket in Halifax West, he would have to bring the Conservative party from its third-place finish in the federal 2021 election to first place.
Metlege Diab won the 2021 election, a race made wide open after Geoff Regan retired. He held the seat for the Liberals since 1993 – lost in ‘97 when all NS Liberals, including David Dingwall, were defeated. Regan reclaimed the seat in 2000 and won consecutive elections until his 2021 retirement.
Metlege Diab took 48 per cent of the vote, grabbing 24,744 votes. She spent $83.7K to win.
In the 2021 race, the NDP came second in Halifax West, with its standard-bearer Jonathan Keith Roberts getting 24 per cent of the ballots cast. He spent $15K in that race.
Seen as a contender at the time, who had generated a lot of Halifax business people’s support – and donations, the Tory candidate in 2021 came third.
Eleanor Humphries took only 22 per cent of the vote but spent $51.5K. She had a stellar career at Halifax Stanfield, in senior management roles.
She did get support from top business leaders such as Mickey MacDonald & Rob Steele.
Metlege Diab is a proven election winner and occupied senior cabinet roles in the 2013-2021 Liberal Stephen McNeil provincial government.
One top role was as Immigration Minister.
In 2020, she was also seen as a successor to McNeil, who retired in 2021 as premier. Instead, she did not run and the 2021 leadership race was won by Iain Rankin.
While opinion polls have PM Trudeau lagging by 18 per cent behind Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, Metlege Diab is an election fighter.
Metlege Diab is from the powerful and influential Halifax Lebanese community, an ethnic body that includes over 13,000 folk in Nova Scotia.
The Lebanese members of the Halifax community are politically savvy, and 55 of them are active residential landlord developers.
Back in 2018, to illustrate how Metlege Diab is a darling of the successful Lebanese immigrants in the capital city, that year at the gala celebrating Lebanon Independence Day, I reported that Wadih Fares, that country’s honorary consul general in Nova Scotia, and a prominent apartment and condo developer, honoured Metlege Diab with a Recognition Award for her continuous support of the Lebanese community.
That award is granted to a person who might be of Lebanese extraction or a friend and strong supporter of the vibrant Lebanese community in this province.
Wadih Fares, Maritime Consul General for Lebanon, bestowed Lena Metlege Diab with a ‘recognition award’ for her work with the Lebanese community in 2018. She is a former Nova Scotia Immigration Minister.
Metlege Diab, who was first elected as MLA for Halifax Armdale in 2013, and again in 2017, has been a trailblazer since she became the first Lebanese-Nova Scotian to sit in the provincial legislature.
She also became the first-ever woman Justice Minister and performed strongly as Immigration minister.
With an ageing population, immigration is one of the keys to the growth of Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada.
Metlege Diab was born in 1965 in Halifax. Her father and uncle had immigrated to Canada from Lebanon in the mid-1950s, but her grandparents returned to Lebanon and their sons took turns living with them, leaving Lena and her sister in Lebanon with their grandmother.
After the civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975, Lena’s father brought the entire family back to Halifax where she learned English and continued her education up to a graduate degree in Public Administration and later law school.
This was achieved while raising four children, and giving back to her community.
She was previously involved in the Diman Association and later served as president of the Canadian Lebanon Society.
In a 2012 interview with the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Metlege Diab said the thing that is important to her is family roots.
“What’s important is, never forget your roots, never forget what your parents or grandparents and their parents had to do to get you to where you are,” she said.
“They left their homes to come to a new land, not knowing what’s there for them because they believed and they had hoped — well, because the hope is that things will be better for them, and even though they didn’t have families, they wanted to have families and the hope was this was going to be better for their future, for their children and their children’s children.
“And when things were better…a lot of them wanted to go back to their home but didn’t. And to them that was a hardship to stay here because they wanted to stay for their kids because they still saw it as a land of better opportunities for those kids,” she says.
“So, what I have to tell my kids, and hopefully they’ll tell their kids is never to take anything for granted because you don’t get anything unless you work for it,” she added.
Metlege Diab graduated from Saint Mary’s University in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science. She then attended Dalhousie University where she obtained her Master of Public Administration in 1987 and a law degree in 1990.
Halifax West Liberal MP Lena Metlege Diab. (Facebook).
She then operated a small boutique law firm, and as such became a small business entrepreneur.
In 2010, she was a recipient of the Outstanding Professional of the Year award from the Canadian Lebanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. That year, she also received the Mainland North Champion Award.
In 2013, Metlege Diab was a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and the Nova Scotia Provincial Volunteer Award.
She is a past president of the Lebanon Society of Halifax, serving as president when that organization celebrated its 75th-anniversary celebrations in 2013.
Fun fact: She worked as a page at the Nova Scotia Legislature, while a SMU student.
