I am deeply humbled to rise before all of you, my esteemed colleagues, in this truly august chamber, to deliver my inaugural remarks as the member of provincial Parliament for Don Valley East. Madam Speaker, I thank you for allowing me this opportunity.

I invite everyone to take a moment and look around us. I can’t help but admire the richly stained wood making up our desks, these beautiful golden clips, the silent and busy industrious army of young legislative pages—thank you for all your service, by the way, on this last day of yours. We sit amongst intricate carvings, rich tapestries, beautiful murals, and when we’re done here, I’ll retire to my office which has 17-foot ceilings and, frankly, a comical number of new computers that just keep getting delivered by IT services.

This is very real for us. And yet, it is not reality for Ontario. The average income in our province is $52,600. That number is influenced, of course, by people like us who make well over $100,000. If you take everyone in the province and rank them from the lowest income to highest income and you split that right down the middle, the median income for our population is $39,100. And so, in this beautiful chamber, we are insulated from that reality, but I hope that we will never forget it. I know that I can’t.

I’m the first child of immigrants from families that have taken, quite frankly, the scenic route to this country by travelling, over a few generations, from India to East Africa, then to the United Kingdom and, finally, ultimately, to Canada. With our family having endured so much hardship along the way, I’ve been raised to look out for and defend those who, like ourselves in the past, hadn’t enjoyed much privilege.

Growing up, my parents weren’t sure what I would be good at and so they signed me up for everything in the hopes that something would stick. I always put my heart and soul into everything, but never really found anything that I was truly exceptional at. For example, placed in Little League baseball, I was always relegated to the deep outfield. In soccer, I was always given some token minutes of field time but otherwise busied myself with eating orange slices on the side. I was bullied in school and, therefore, dutifully put in martial arts. I earned a black belt; however, my strongest scores on my black belt test were not in sparring or patterns but on the essay that I had to write, because I was and continue to be an academic. I eventually earned a pilot licence, but was threatened with failure multiple times for various reasons, including poor eye-hand coordination and a tendency to taxi my Cessna 150 above the speed limit every single time.

These experiences and others taught me a few things. I learned about hard work and perseverance. I learned about how much people struggle, even if outwardly it looks like they have everything under control. And I discovered that my calling was to help others who, like myself, may not always have fit in or needed a little bit of extra help. Coupled with my interest in science, this led me to my career in medicine.

I studied medicine at the University of Toronto, just across the street from here. It’s actually amusing to think how many times I’ve cut across the south driveway over here because I was running late for class. I eventually earned dual qualifications in family medicine and emergency medicine and started my career going to the places where help was needed the most, serving rural and remote communities, especially Indigenous communities, in northern Ontario, the Northwest Territories and in the Canadian Arctic.

I delivered babies, admitted in-patients, worked in emergency departments and at one point was the sole physician providing 24/7 coverage for multiple consecutive weeks in a community that was 40,000 square kilometres. I transported gunshot victims in air ambulances, performed emergency surgery alone in nursing stations, and one time even received a gift of a polar bear skull after saving the life of an Indigenous matriarch in a remote community.

And while all of this has been rewarding, I always felt that the need for help exceeded what I could offer and that I was never addressing the root causes of my patients’ illnesses. For example, on far too many occasions, I’ve treated a troubled, suicidal Indigenous youth in the emergency department, providing counselling or medications, only to discharge them back into the same homelessness, poverty and intergenerational trauma that made them suicidal in the first place.

I’ve seen growing health impacts of climate change through increased prevalence of heat-related medical emergencies, of increasing respiratory illnesses from air pollution caused by forest fires and the growing prevalence of tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease.

I’ve seen people come to the emergency department on a regular basis because they have nowhere to sleep or nothing to eat, and I’ve seen kids come to the ER because they’ve developed eating disorders from the stress of this pandemic and because they had no mental health worker to see them. These experiences made me want to do more.

In 2017, I took a sabbatical from my medical work and studied public policy at the University of Oxford. My goal was to learn economics, law and political science so that I could implement pragmatic policy solutions to the social policy problems I saw unfolding instead of just complaining about them. And I hope that, in this chamber, you will find that my criticism is always intended to be constructive, helpful and well intentioned.

The pandemic struck soon after I returned from Oxford and, alongside my work as an emergency doctor in Toronto, I became the medical director of 11 COVID isolation shelters for homeless people in Toronto. I had the privilege of overseeing the work of nurses, nurse practitioners, family doctors, psychiatrists and addictions specialists, and I’ve no doubt that our work saved countless lives by managing outbreaks and fighting the opioid epidemic. Meanwhile, I dealt with COVID patients in the ER and fought for disadvantaged communities in Toronto to get vaccinated.

But there is always more work to be done. So I embarked on this career, where I count myself so fortunate to stand in your midst, amongst all of your illustrious ranks, to join each of you in the fight for a better province.

It is clear by now that I have only just become a political person, and so I needed a lot of help to get here. I would like to thank my wife, Salimah, and our darling puppy, Petunia Wigglebottom. She’s a two-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever-cocker spaniel mix that we love, frankly too much because, unfortunately, my wife and I can’t have children. By the way, as evidence that I’m a political novice, I would like to point out that Petunia has a better Instagram account than I do.

I’d like to thank my parents, my sister and my brother-in-law, who have been there for me physically and emotionally before, during and now even after the campaign. And I would like to thank the best damn campaign team that anyone could possibly hope for, including incredible volunteers and very generous donors. All of them have been kind, patient, incredibly hard-working and so tolerant of my political naïveté.

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the past MPP for my riding, Michael Coteau, and his lovely wife, Lori. He’s a former minister from this Legislature, and we are honoured to have him continue his public service now as a federal member in Ottawa. I simply couldn’t be here without him. I hope that I can continue in his tradition of fighting for those of us who are most vulnerable, as he exemplified when he passed his landmark legislation, Bill 89, which increased protections for minors.

And now a word about my riding, Don Valley East: It is a riding that is the very microcosm of what makes our province so great. In Don Valley East, we are profoundly diverse and multicultural, with a vibrant sense of community, along with unmatched resilience in the face of no shortage of struggles. We have outstanding shopping, world-class museums, sprawling greenery and a majestic ravine ecosystem. To represent this community is the greatest privilege of my life, and I thank the voters for placing their trust in me. I will never stop fighting and championing your needs.

In my final moments, I would like to acknowledge I have so much to learn from every single one of you. I wonder if, in anticipation of that, I may try to return the favour by offering a few suggestions of my own, drawing upon my clinical experience.

I would first like to share my firm conviction that all policy is health policy. When I say this, what I mean is that we can’t achieve our physical, emotional and social well-being until we have addressed things like proper education, housing, affordability and a better environment. Health care needs, of course, nurses, doctors and hospitals, but it isn’t just about those things.

Second, I hope that the decisions in this room can be guided by evidence and data. My colleague from Kingston and the Islands spoke last week of his commitment to the scientific method. In that same spirit, I hope that our decisions can be guided by intellectual curiosity and a rigorous devotion to data, where and when it is available. In medicine, following the evidence has often taken me in surprising directions that have challenged my preconceived notions, and it is by following the evidence that I have come to understand empirically that health care should be about patients and not profits.

And third, in this chamber I hope that we can be courageous in choosing the right solutions and not just the easy ones. As politicians we are often asked to defend the most visible or immediate consequences of a particular policy, when it is the later consequences that will be the ones that have the greatest or most lasting impact. For example, an adequate number of paid sick days is an example where there may be an upfront cost that some of us might balk at, but for which the later economic benefits—in prevented outbreaks and decreased health care utilization—could actually save more money.

Many people have wondered why I, a physician, would propose to step away from a clinical career to serve in elected office. At its core, medicine and politics are fundamentally about the same thing. They are about helping people. The difference is in the tools that we use to accomplish this and the scale with which we can have that impact. So fundamentally I am here for the same reason that all of you are here: There are 15 million people in this province that need us. I want to join you in fighting for every single one of them.

And so I thank you for welcoming me amongst your ranks.