As you know, I'm the candidate for Scarborough Southwest for MPP. I have grown up in Scarborough Southwest. I've lived here for about 14 years. I went to school here, say, take a W of order that many of our kids are going now. I also went to University of Toronto, St. George. I have a Master's in Development and Planning from UCL. And in terms of my career, I... UCL means University College London. University College London, sorry. Yes. And I worked at the University of Toronto Students Union for a few years. I'm also the Research Officer at Society of Energy Professionals, where we represent a lot of energy workers and lawyers, IT professionals. And right now I'm only for this few weeks for election because we're canvassing. And before that job, I was managing a campaign called Keep Hydro Public, which was to stop the privatization of Hydro One. Thank you. Thank you. You have raised that issue that you were involved in a campaign. This morning when I was watching television, I got the news that the Hydro One, they have proposed or they have already increased the salary of the CEO and the board of directors. So this is one aspect. So keeping that in mind since you were involved with that campaign. So can you just give us some idea that before getting into politics, you got, as you said, that you got involved with that campaign. So can you just tell us something about that campaign? Of course. It was a province-wide campaign. I'm really proud of the work that we did. We went across the province from Scarborough to Thunder Bay to Sudbury and met people around the province. And we wanted to see what people felt about the privatization. Because Hydro One actually is just, you know, it's one of the few things that this province owns. And what I mean by that is people own it. So you and I own it. And anything that we earn from it, so the dividends actually come back to the province. So every year, about $749 million used to come back to the province for us to use for things like our schools, our hospitals. And when the liberal government decided to sell off Hydro One, about 83% of the people opposed it. Because we knew that things like the salary in Christianity- So those benefits would not come to the society or these? Not anymore. Well, it was to the province. So the government would have that money to use it for things like our school, like repairing our schools, for example. What happens now is about 53% of it is sold off to private shareholders. Which means that the government doesn't have that control. Because majority is. Exactly. And when people opposed it, that was their biggest fear. It's a golden goose. It lays the egg. Don't sell it. We don't have a lot of things we own anymore. So don't sell it. But the liberal government had a majority government. So they didn't really need, they were a little bit arrogant, in my opinion. So they went ahead and sold it. And now what we're facing is CEOs getting eight times more the salary than the years before. Which I think it's a little unfair because we've got working class people who are still suffering and electricity rates went up. It went up so much that some people are deciding between groceries and paying their electricity bill. Or their rent, paying their electricity bill. That's how difficult it's been. That if you are elected, hopefully you will. So what would be your priority for the first year? The first year, I think there are quite a few priorities. But what I want to do first is what I mentioned before is to address child poverty. I want to make sure that people in this writing are represented well and their interest is heard. I know our seniors have been raising their concerns about the way they are treated. We want to make sure that we address that. We want to make sure that our children are getting the best education they deserve. And we want to make sure that our parents who came here with so many dreams, we turned them into reality. And I will make sure that I represent people's interest and I will be there and I will show up to things like the way an employee of the people should. Well, Assalamu alaikum. It's a real pleasure to be with you today and to have an opportunity to introduce myself to let you know a little bit about who I am and why I'm doing this, what I'm all about. So I never expected to be doing this. I'm an academic. I was teaching at the University of Toronto at Mrs. Saga, but I have to start a little bit farther back. I was born in South Africa. I come from a mixed background and my parents came to Canada when I was almost five years old to escape a partake. When I was growing up in Montreal, I encountered a lot of racism and it made me feel that I did not belong. I never was able to feel comfortable. And it was very difficult for me to talk to my father about what was going on for me because my parents had made huge sacrifices. It was very difficult to leave, to come to a country that was new. What I was experiencing was of course not the staggering racism of South Africa, but nonetheless I was still encountering a lot of you don't belong here. I was coded as both a Jewish and black. And the Jewish part was, well you're a Christ killer, but we can fix that. We can convert you to Christianity. But the black part was you're not really quite human. You're not the same as or as good as the rest of us. So I spent my childhood thinking about these questions and what does it mean to belong? When I grew up, I became an academic. I teach diaspora studies, actually. I was teaching diaspora studies at the University of Toronto and thinking about how do we create a socially just diverse society? So how do we create a society that is socially just, that works for everybody, that makes everybody feel included or nobody feels left out? And that's been sort of my life's work to do research, to think, to write and to teach about these kinds of subjects. So a couple of years ago, I actually got tired of doing research that kept showing me how deep systemic racism, including Islamophobia is in this country. And I wanted to do something about it. There are people working in the public sector, in the government sector. There are people working in law for profits. The private sector has done some stuff, but it hasn't been very effective. So I decided that that's where I wanted to focus my work. So I started to prepare to work for boards of directors and senior management of private companies to help them figure out how to get rid of the Islamophobia and the racism from their organizations. That's good. That's going to make their organizations more successful, more profitable, and of course it's good for people who want to get jobs and rise within the organizations. So that's what I was doing when I got approached by the NDP in November and asked if I would run for all of this. Have you been involved with deep politics? I've never been involved in politics, and I never thought I would be involved with politics. I've been very involved with social justice work, with public speaking, and working, doing online work, supporting communities, working against Islamophobia, working against racism in the community, in various communities. So you know the issues and you're quite aware of the issues? I'm very familiar with the issues, but I had never thought of politics. And my initial response was, I'm not a politician, but then I realized that this was actually a really interesting opportunity to be able to talk about the need for systemic change. So how do we change the systems and the institutions so they work for everyone? And that's why I stepped up to do things. Thank you. So you have mentioned a number of things which will somehow or in many ways will also address the issue of poverty. But we have seen that in a huge number of families, I mean almost 13.4, on-ter-you families are living in poverty. So apart from all these things you have mentioned, do you have any other specific plan that or how you are planning to assist this low income? For sure. So I mean I think it's really important to understand that poverty is the result of other factors. And poverty isn't itself the problem. The problem is the systems that lead to poverty. And if you don't understand it that way, you will always be throwing band-aids at poverty and you will never be fixing the problem. The problem is why do you have communities that continue to live in poverty? What is going on to cause that? And then how do you fix those systems? So those, and I think that the NDP platform, what I'm excited about it is that it is doing a good job of getting at the root of so many of those things. People live in poverty because they can't afford because they've had precarious jobs where the wage is a big too low. Where they can't afford housing and their childcare's been too high. They don't have a permanent job as well. And they don't have a permanent job. Sometimes because they can't get a permanent job because of the way that they observe their faith or because of their names or the color of their skin. So if you don't go back to tackling the systemic racism and the systemic Islamophobia, you can't alleviate some of those issues. So it is about things like childcare and housing and transportation and hydro, but it is also about tackling that systemic racism in Islamophobia.