Crawford Kilian has posted an intriguing profile of Sherry Shaghaghi, the NDP candidate in North Vancouver:

The fundamentalist revolution of 1979 hit when she was a teenager, and gave her one powerful personal experience. Girls in her school were forced to wear the hijab. Sherry’s long hair fell below the bottom of her scarf; a vice-principal used scissors to cut off the exposed bottom three inches.

“I realized how trapped women were in Iran,” she recalls. Her father, who was prosecuted under both the Shah’s regime and the ayatollahs’, began to fear for her life. After completing a degree in electronic engineering, she left the country.

From Iran she went to Turkey, then to England, and finally to Canada. Arriving in Vancouver on Christmas Day 1989, she says she fell in love with the country at her first sight of English Bay.

A counsellor at VCC changed her life, “by guiding me to decide what I wanted to do, not what I had to do”—a critical passage for countless immigrant women from cultures where men decide women’s fates. Abandoning electronics, Sherry studied psychology and became a Gestalt therapist. She now runs a private practice as a clinical counsellor.

She also became active in her community, working with such organizations as the Immigrant Services Society, North Shore Multicultural Society, North Shore Women’s Centre, and the Vancouver Association for the Survivors of Torture. Her professional and volunteer work brought her face to face with the problems of immigrants and native-born Canadians alike.

There’s much more – enough to convince me that, quite apart from my obvious partisan leanings, I’d love to see Ms. Shaghaghi in the House of Commons. I hope the voters of North Vancouver feel the same way.