via The Anchor Weekly – The Chestermere Lake News – The Canadian Parliament is expected to hear a speech from His Highness the Aga Khan, 49th hereditary Imam of the world’s 15 million Shia Ismaili Muslims, on February 27, 2014. He is also expected to meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the visit.
Usually, it is heads of state and government who are invited to address the Canadian Parliament but among the handful of people who have had the privilege to do so are three former secretaries general of the U.N., including Kofi Annan.
The Aga Khan’s association with Canada dates back to the time when Pierre Trudeau was the prime minister.
Ismailimail 
The title is one-sided: The Aga Khan strengthens his ties to Canada, but also vice versa, in a “virtuous spiral”. As Mr Ladha points out the spiral started with the Uganda Asian expulsion, when around 7,000 of the stranded people, recently disenfranchised, were taken in by Canada. The Aga Khan’s friendship with PM Trudeau played a role, though to spoil the ongoing euphoria, Trudeau was first reacting to pleas from UK PM Edward Heath to alleviate the problem faced by “an overcrowded island” from a “tide of involuntary immigrants from Uganda.” (Statement to Parliament on August 24, 1972, three weeks into the expulsion notice.) Also worth noting is the Canadian mission applied the points system until almost the very end, even though this was a refugee situation. The final tally we glean from the diary of the chief of the mission that came to process us is over 60 percent of applicants were either rejected outright or failed the interview. Within just six months of arrival in Canada, we learn from a survey conducted by Manpower, over 80 percent of the people had found jobs, although not commensurately with their qualifications. FFW to 15 years later and the once-refugees boasted several millionaires among them. They were not always the proverbial “shirt on their back” that people like to make out: Many had money stashed away abroad, a grievance of the Expeller-in-Chief Uganda President Idi Amin. The immigrants’ success contributed to the adoption of multiculturism as Canada’s national law in 1987, which then encouraged the Aga Khan to site his Global Centre for Pluralism in Canada. The spiral continues, with the granting of six honorary doctorates to the Aga Khan from Canadian universities, the honorary citizenship – and now the honour of addressing the joint houses of parliament, only the sixth non-head of state to do so, of whom three were pro forma UN secretaries general. One could say without any reservation the Aga Khan has received more honours from Canada than any other individual from Canada or any other country. So the Aga Khan-Canada ties are very strong and will strengthen as the Imam is seen as the moderate face of Islam.
Warning: Commercial coming: All the above is from my book on Uganda Asians (Then and Now, Here and There). It should appear in July, seven years in the writing, and break a few wrists weighing in at 7 kg, 1.2 million words. Will it also burst the block? There are no more than 4,000 pre-1972 Uganda Asians households left in the world today, so sales was never a consideration. Self-publish, as no publisher understood the obsession.
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