By Andrew Macdonald
A federal Liberal leadership bid by Transport Minister Anita Anand is off the table.
The Kentville native also will not run for re-election in her Ontario riding.
She announced Saturday afternoon she had decided against a leadership run.
“In these roles, I have given all I have to keep Canada safe, strong, and freeI e ntered public life because I wanted to make a meaningful contribution to my community and country, a goal instilled in me by my parents, who immigrated to Canada before I was born,” she said.
Formerly a defence minister, Anand is MP for Oakville, Ont., but she grew up in Kentville, born in the Centennial year of 1967, which would make her 58 now.
She was glowingly featured in a 2022 issue of Maclean’s Magazine, and had been touted as the future Liberal leader given that Justin Trudeau has announced his resignation.
“Sexual misconduct in the military. A war in Ukraine. Canada’s global reputation at stake. It’s a good thing Anand knows how to solve problems,” said Maclean’s in the 2022 issue. She was defence minister then.
“It’s easy to forget now that she’s a senior minister, but Anand is still a newcomer who’s only been in federal politics (since 2019),” wrote Maclean’s.
“She is no stranger to holding a cabinet portfolio that suddenly bursts into flames. She was procurement minister when the pandemic arrived, and that file — normally important but dull — turned into a frantic global shopping spree for protective equipment, rapid tests and vaccines.
“Looming over her job as defence minister is no less than the existential global threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s unhinged savagery in Ukraine and its upending of the post-Cold War world order.”
As Anand told a conference of defence experts in May 2022, with lawyerly circumspection, “We do live in a world at the present time that appears to be growing darker,” Maclean’s reported, adding “Anand is one of the obvious possible leadership contenders.”
Anita Anand is a former Defence minister who was raised in Kentville. Contributed
Raised in the Annapolis Valley
“In the early 1960s, Anand’s mother and father, Saroj Daulat Ram and Sundaram Vivek Anand—an anaesthetist and general surgeon—were living in Nigeria with their preschool-aged daughter, Gita, when Sundaram travelled to investigate the possibility of immigrating to Canada or the United States,” Maclean’s reported.
“The first place he landed was Halifax. He rented a car, drove to Nova Scotia’s bucolic Annapolis Valley and discovered the right place for his family. They settled in Kentville, a picturesque town of 6,000, where Anita was born in 1967 and her sister Sonia in 1968. They were one of the few South Asian families around at the time, and with no relatives in Canada, they grew up knit tightly to each other and their hometown.
“We were definitely distinct,” Anand says. “But by the same token, we were one of the community,”“,
Family met Pierre Elliott Trudeau
“One day, when Sonia and Anita were about four and five years old, Ram drove them to the military base in Greenwood where they watched Pierre Elliot Trudeau disembark from a helicopter. Trudeau noticed Ram’s sari immediately and came over, bowing to her with the Indian greeting of namaste. On the way home in the car, as the family lore goes, their mother told them, ‘You girls need to serve your country. Your country needs you’.”, reported Maclean’s.
