MP Randeep Sarai, Law’01, is sitting in his expansive office at Global Affairs Canada on Ottawa’s Sussex Drive, sharing what he calls “fun facts” about Queen’s University.
The first? The now-secretary of state for international development used to recruit for Queen’s in Vancouver. He would meet with prospective law students who’d received early admission to convince them Queen’s was the obvious choice.
His other fun fact? His current boss – Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand – was his law professor at Queen’s.
But that all came later. Back when Mr. Sarai was in Grade 10, he fell in love with design. AutoCAD, the drafting program, was still relatively new. His teacher saw he was a natural and facilitated an internship for him with architect Arthur Erickson, who designed the Canadian Embassy in Washington, among many other projects.
“That was quite the honour,” Mr. Sarai says, adding that he even worked on designs for director Steven Spielberg’s house.
Mr. Sarai then went to work that summer for his uncle’s berry-picking farm and earned $680 – enough for a drafting table and the tools he needed to hang his hand-painted sign: “West Coast Designs, for all your home design needs.”
He designed 400 houses in seven years, finished his undergrad debt-free, and even helped the immigrant community to affect a bylaw change using common sense.
He had always planned to go to law school but only applied to Ontario law schools as an afterthought – architecture had become his focus.
“Then I got the letter from Queen’s – one of the best universities in Canada,” he says. His fiancée and parents both urged him to go. “So, I went to law school, and my wife did a master’s in political science at Queen’s. We got married on a Sunday and flew Monday night on a red-eye to Toronto and drove to Kingston from there.”
At 51, he says he’s already done everything he always wanted to do in life. He got to design homes and fulfil his desire to be a lawyer. He’s also always loved politics, and that’s what he’s doing now, joining the longtime involvement of his wife, Kaur Sarai, MA’00, with the Liberal party, first as a staffer for then-prime minister Jean Chrétien.
Mr. Sarai, a father of three, says he loved his time at Queen’s partly because no one knew anyone to begin with, so they bonded fast. In addition, professors were very accessible, even on weekends.
“The city’s focus is really the university,” he says. “There was a huge sense of belonging. It was a very healthy competitive environment.”
These days, his day-to-day work depends on whether he’s in his riding in Surrey, B.C., or in Ottawa. In Surrey, constituency work and charity events take his time. In Ottawa, he’s in the House of Commons or serving as a secretary of state, which includes lots of travel.
He says his parents taught him to work hard and give back. During the 2000s, an opportunity arose as Vancouver was grappling with escalating gang violence, which had killed more than 100 young men. The attorney general asked the Sarais to work with the community to found the South Asian Coalition Against Youth Violence, which successfully championed for the creation of the Integrated Gang Task Force. He also co-founded Virsa – Supporting Youth Strengthening Families Society, which educated gang members’ parents on how to stop their involvement. And he helped raise money for polio survivors.
“My dad always said you have to give back,” Mr. Sarai says. “I still hear from people who tell me my dad gave them [for example] a down payment on a house. That’s pretty neat.” The MP feels the same way, including about giving back to his alma mater.
