Adil Shamji is many things: the MPP for Don Valley East, a member of the small Liberal caucus at Queen’s Park, and a certified physician. (“Please call me Adil,” he says when I call him Dr. Shamji.) One thing he isn’t is an experienced elected official: he was formally sworn in at the legislature on July 15 of last year, not even a full year ago. He’s not letting that stop him from aiming for the big chair within his party: on Saturday, he’ll formally declare his candidacy for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party at an event in east Toronto.
Of his known rivals for the Liberal leadership, Shamji is the only one without some form of elected career prior to the 2022 election: Bonnie Crombie is the multi-term mayor of Mississauga, Nate Erskine-Smith has been an MP since 2015, Yasir Naqvi has been both an MP and was an MPP who held numerous cabinet posts, and Kingston and the Islands MPP Ted Hsu did a previous stint as an MP from 2011 to 2015.
So what makes Shamji think he’s ready for a job leading a major political party — a job that could involve potentially becoming Premier of Ontario?
“In the span of a year, I’ve done more work than most MPPs get done in an entire term. I was elected in an unbelievably tough election,” he says, alluding to the Liberal disappointment in 2022, when the party failed to increase its seat count at Queen’s Park. “As one of only seven Liberal MPPs for the entire province, without the trappings of official party status, I’ve had to do everything myself.”
When you’ve got an obvious deficit your rivals are going to hammer away on, try to turn it into an asset: it’s politics 101, and the fact that Shamji has an answer ready is, if nothing else, a sign that he’s a quick student. The Vancouver-born, Brampton-raised ER doctor certainly doesn’t lack for experience outside politics, and he says that’s what he would bring to the party if he were to win its December 2 leadership vote.
“I’ve spent a decade as a physician, being invited into people’s lives at their darkest moments. I understand how policy failures impact people’s well-being,” he says. “It’s really easy to just look at numbers on a page or places on a map and dismiss the actual consequences that poor public policy are having for people. I bring that experience.”
The electorate might have moved on from anti-COVID public-health measures, but Shamji may still benefit from the prominence that the pandemic gave to health-care policy in general and doctors in particular. (He says, making a joke that’s both funny and kind of sad, that in going from medicine to politics, he “went from being in one of the most trusted professions to one of the least.”) Certainly, he’s making his health-care experience front and centre in his leadership bid: he says that “all policy is health policy.”
“If we want to truly achieve maximum well-being, which I think is a fundamental responsibility of government, then we have to make sure we get housing right, education right, the environment right, and cost of living right,” Shamji says. “And if we don’t, then people suffer.”
His campaign has already launched with nods to some of his previous private-member’s bills that he says will be planks in his leadership campaign: guaranteed access to family doctors for all Ontarians and changes to school funding and teacher ratios. He also has a suggestion to make Ontario’s holidays more diverse by giving workers a floating right to a paid statutory holiday anywhere in the calendar, as the current list of days is heavy on Christian and colonial observances of debatable relevance to the province’s current demographic mix. He’ll also be announcing a housing policy at his Saturday launch event.
Of the many arguments being made during the Liberal leadership race — old versus new, left versus right — there’s another one that separates Shamji and Ted Hsu from the rest of the pack: the question of how important it is for the party leader to have a seat in the legislature itself before the next election. Skeptics say the leader can do more good for the party from outside of Queen’s Park, by spreading the party’s message. Shamji, predictably, disagrees.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re an MP from Ottawa or a mayor from Mississauga. If you haven’t worked in Queen’s Park under this Ford government, you can’t be ready to outmanoeuvre them on Day One like I am,” he says. “I’ve learned the strategies they use; on a daily basis, I hold the Ford government to account, and I’m ready to continue doing that.”
(Shamji has his seat, but maybe only for now: the federal-election boundaries commission has recommended deleting the riding of Don Valley East and dividing it up among the remaining ridings of Scarboorough Centre, Don Valley North, and Don Valley West; the new ridings would be called Don Valley North, Don Valley South, and Scarborough Centre-Don Valley East. If the province were to adopt the changes to federal-riding boundaries, as it’s done since 1999, Shamji’s seat would cease to exist, albeit only at the call of the next election in 2026.)
If he wins, Shamji would then be able to look forward to having one of the worst jobs in Canadian politics: trying to lead a Liberal party without official party status back to government. He says he’s undaunted by the challenge.
“As an emergency doctor, we step into crises,” he says. “We don’t turn our backs to them.”
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