NRI
MP, Nina Grewal's degree in political silence
Surrey, B.C. and Ottawa, June 11, 2005
Globe and Mail
She learned everything she needed to know about
politics from watching the parliamentary channel CPAC,
her husband Gurmant Grewal says, but Nina Grewal's
continued silence has a growing number of critics
wondering if she was watching on mute.
NRI, Nina won her first election in a seat Mr. Grewal
didn't want.
Both put their names forward in two adjacent ridings
and he, as the senior politician in the household,
decided which constituency he wanted, leaving her
with his second choice.
When she gave a CBC radio interview after they both
won for the Tories in the 2004 election, making history
as the first husband-and-wife team elected at the
same time, he whispered the answers to her.
As her husband stumbled from taped conversations to
negotiated stress leave, Ms. Grewal, the Conservative
MP for the Surrey riding of Fleetwood-Port Kells,
has remained resolutely silent.
Both in Ottawa and in her own political backyard,
she has a reputation as more a quiet supplicant than
an active participant in public life.
In the hours of conversation Mr. Grewal had with
the Liberals, she is referred to simply as his wife
as the talk centres on a possible Senate seat for
her part of a deal that would have seen the
couple leave the Conservative party or sit out the
budget vote.
Mr. Grewal boasts in the recordings that he will
win easily in the next election while she may not.
His own personal story is very brilliant,
he says. Hers is virtually unknown.
There is growing uneasiness about her silence, her
inexperience and the mounting damage that has been
done to the Conservatives.
Manjit Dhillon, a Conservative organizer with the
Fraser Valley's Indo-Canadian community and an executive
in Conservative MP Randy White's Abbotsford riding,
said her silence, combined with her husband's actions,
has hurt the credibility of politicians in general
and the politically active ethnic community in particular.
It will take 10 years for the Indo-Canadian
community to regain any trust, whether what happened
on the tape is true or false and keeping quiet on
her part doesn't help, he said. We see
that Stephen Harper is standing behind Gurmant Grewal,
but his wife is not saying anything. Even Hillary
stood behind Bill Clinton when things turned.
Ms. Grewal has no intention of talking now. She turned
down interviews, and in a brief talk outside the family's
home in upscale Panorama Ridge, Jay Grewal said his
mother is supporting her husband. She won't
talk to you. No one in her office will talk about
this now. We're just supporting each other through
this, he said. She wants to continue her
work.
Her life before she got started in politics remains
something of a mystery.
Born in Osaka, Japan, where her father had business
interests, Ms. Grewal, 46, and her family moved to
Liberia in West Africa when she was 4½ years
old. From there, she was sent to Shimla, India, to
study in a convent, finishing her college degree in
history and English literature before getting married
in 1982.
My father placed a matrimonial advertisement
in The Tribune newspaper and Gurmant's parents responded,
she said in a rare interview in November, 2004, for
an Indian website.
After their marriage, the young couple moved to Liberia
where their sons Japjot (Jay) and Livjot, now 19 and
21, were born.
Mr. Grewal, 47, once told a Vancouver reporter he
was an adviser to Liberian dictator Sam Doe, although
he has since denied it. He says he worked as a professor
of agriculture, and started a number of ventures,
including a cellphone company and pest control business.
Ms. Grewal's website says only that she worked in
the family business while in Liberia.
Civil war led the family to leave, and they made
their way to Canada after stays in Britain and the
United States. Despite the fact that, on tape, Mr.
Grewal says he came here with little money, he was
able to acquire a carpet business shortly after arriving.
Mr. Grewal first ran for political office as a B.C.
Liberal in 1995, but was unsuccessful. He won federally
two years later as a Reformer. Ms. Grewal would often
attend functions and give speeches on his behalf when
his schedule got too busy. This was good political
training, she told IndiaNest.com.
While Ms. Grewal's first brush with political life
had been as a stand-in, her husband's controversies
often propelled him to the front lines. He once claimed
he taped an offer of a deputy cabinet position from
the B.C. Liberals, and later hired Rachel Marsden
in his riding office, a right-wing pundit who had
pleaded guilty to stalking a radio personality.
In 2004, Mr. and Ms. Grewal announced their intentions
to run in two different ridings and signed up substantial
number of new Conservative members within the Indo-Canadian
community. In the riding Ms. Grewal subsequently ran
in, she fended off a high-profile contender, Mary
Polak, the former Surrey school board chair, who withdrew
her bid for the nomination, arguing her opponent had
an unfair advantage because of her husband's access
to membership lists.
Community activist Manpreet Grewal, no relation to
the family, said she has often asked people if they
had heard of Ms. Grewal before she entered the race.
Not one person that I know has ever remembered
her doing anything in the community. It's a big mystery
about where she came from, what she did, she
said. People here resent the fact that someone
who was only known as the wife of a politician suddenly
becomes a politician herself with nothing to show
with any community involvement.
But Chris Mathisen, an organizer for the Conservatives
in Surrey and White Rock, said he has sat with Ms.
Grewal at policy conventions and in election preparation
meetings.
I've chatted with her and we've discussed issues.
She has her opinions, he said. She's also
a nice lady.
The new riding of Fleetwood-Port Kells, created in
a 2004 redistribution, is 20-per-cent Indo-Canadian,
with a growing affluent population. It was considered
a safe Tory seat when the election was called.
When questions arose during the campaign about her
qualifications, her husband said she watched CPAC,
the parliamentary TV channel all the time for
the last seven years. We don't watch movies at home.
We only watch CPAC.
In their household, Ms. Grewal has said they eat,
breathe and talk all the time [about] politics.
She won her seat with 36 per cent of the vote, compared
with 30 per cent for her Liberal opponent, former
B.C. cabinet minister Gulzar Cheema.
Dr. Cheema had three campaign managers, including
Ron Churchill, a former organizer with the Reform
and then the Alliance party.
It really hurt losing to someone like her.
We tried everything we knew, the three of us, with
all of our experiences, to convey the message voters
should elect a person, not the party, Mr. Churchill
said. She was the invisible candidate. She wasn't
even the peekaboo candidate. She was fully hidden.
I didn't see the boo.
Mr. Churchill said that at an all-candidates meeting
at Kwantlen College during campaign, Ms. Grewal's
staff directly intervened with signs to help her answer
questions.
The rumour around Parliament Hill, and in Surrey,
is that Mr. Grewal controls everything in his wife's
office from hiring or vetting staff, to checking her
correspondences and dealing with constituent matters
in Fleetwood-Port Kells.
B.C. communications consultant Colin Metcalfe, who
worked on the Tory campaign in the last election,
and knows Ms. Grewal professionally, says she is simply
a very private woman.
Mr. Metcalfe said Ms. Grewal is not a shrinking
violet, but does have trouble with English,
which is not her first language.
Mr. Grewal has returned to the family's home in Surrey,
one of four properties the couple own either together
or separately in the Lower Mainland. Though Mr. Grewal
returned home earlier this week accompanied by RCMP,
Ms. Grewal was expected back only this weekend.
For now, the family lives in a 7,600-square-foot
home in Panorama Ridge, with six-bedrooms, four bathrooms
and a Canadian flag flying. Although no sign is up,
real estate listings show the house is currently for
sale and listed for $978,888.
Neighbours in their enclave say they do not know
the couple well.
These homes are half-acre lots. We have a long
and heavy retaining wall between each other and the
person who is your next door neighbour is actually
a half a block away, said one neighbour, who
said she rarely sees the family, and declined to be
named.
In Ottawa, the couple rarely socialize with other
caucus members. By most accounts, Ms. Grewal stays
close to her husband during and after office hours,
and has no close friends in caucus.
But she does appear to be well-liked and does not
shy away from the microphone during closed-door caucus
sessions.
Her seatmate in the House of Commons Alberta Tory
Lee Richardson says Ms. Grewal is capable of joining
in the rowdiness and has shown her agitation with
some of the catcalls from the other side. Mr. Richardson
dismisses the notion that Ms. Grewal's ethnic heritage
has kept her in the shadows.
Women in that community are pretty strong,
just in a very subtle way. And obviously it works
because people have a different impression than how
it really is, I think. I think she stands up pretty
well.
Carol Skelton, another fellow MP, said Ms. Grewal
just quietly goes about doing her job and shines when
she's in front of the cameras.
That's the whole Ottawa mentality. You look
at someone that's quiet, that's not in the media a
lot and you say, Oh you know, they're under
somebody's shadow,' and that's not true, she
said. As women parliamentarians, we go around
doing our jobs and try to stay out of the media.
Ms. Grewal is interested in immigration and women's
issues, with a focus on raising the age of consent.
But some Tory MPs are not exactly clear on what drives
her.
Honestly, there is nothing that jumps into
my mind what Nina's passion is, says a Tory
colleague who asked not to be named.
She is the vice-chair of the status of women committee.
The chairwoman, Manitoba Liberal MP Anita Neville,
says that some of the issues the committee is dealing
with, such as gender-based analysis and pay equity,
are quite new to Ms. Grewal.
I'm sort of reluctant to talk about her,
said Ms. Neville. I don't really know her. She
attends most meetings.. . .She's quiet but diligent.
One Tory MP notes that in the last election, the
party had to send in MPs to replace her in several
all-candidates debates because it felt she couldn't
handle the issues.
Rob Terris, the head of the Tynehead Community Association
and the Ratepayers Association in her riding, said
yesterday that whenever he approached Ms. Grewal for
assistance in projects such as building a pool in
the riding or erecting a monument, she referred him
to Mr. Grewal.
On every issue I have raised with her, she
told me to go to her husband instead, said Mr.
Terris. She has never responded with her own
thoughts or her own ideas, just deflected it to him
or she would ask me what she should do.
Jaspreet Dhanju, a dentist who lives in the riding,
said she questions whether Ms. Grewal should be representing
the community.
She shouldn't be pushed down because of her
husband. But as a regular person just listening and
trying to understand what's going on, I wonder if
she will ever stand up at all, Dr. Dhanju said.