Ahmed Hussen

Ahmed Hussen (born 1976) is a Somali-Canadian lawyer and Liberal politician, the first Somali-Canadian elected to the Parliament of Canada.¹ He has represented York South—Weston — since 2025 under the name York South—Weston—Etobicoke — in the House of Commons since 2015.¹ He was a cabinet minister from 2017 to 2025: minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship (2017–2019), minister of families, children and social development (2019–2021), minister of housing and diversity and inclusion (2021–2023) and minister of international development (2023–2025).¹

Hussen was born and raised in Mogadishu, Somalia, and left with his family after the civil war reached their neighbourhood; two years later he moved to Canada as a refugee and settled in Toronto's Regent Park in 1996.¹ He earned a BA in history at York University in 2002, studied law at the University of Ottawa, and was called to the bar in September 2012.¹ He began in public service in 2001 as a volunteer at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and then worked as an assistant, and later special assistant, to Ontario Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty.¹ He founded the Regent Park Community Council and served as national president of the Canadian Somali Congress.¹

Hussen won the Liberal nomination for York South—Weston in December 2014 and was elected in the 2015 federal election.¹ Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed him minister of immigration on 10 January 2017, and he remained in the cabinet through successive shuffles until 14 March 2025.¹ He was re-elected in 2025 in the redrawn riding of York South—Weston—Etobicoke and was elected chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 45th Parliament.¹

As immigration minister, Hussen announced in 2017 that Canada would welcome nearly one million immigrants over the following three years, and on 31 October 2018 he announced an updated multi-year plan raising admissions to 350,000 by 2021.¹ As minister of international development, he travelled to the Middle East in January 2025, after the fall of the Assad regime, and announced 17.25 million dollars of humanitarian aid for Syria.¹

The judgements in this section belong to their sources, not to the museum. An Angus Reid Institute poll of December 2018 found Hussen among the least popular ministers in the Trudeau cabinet.¹ In August 2022 it emerged that his department, at the housing and diversity and inclusion portfolio, had given a 133,000-dollar grant to the Community Media Advocacy Centre, an organisation whose senior consultant had a documented history of antisemitic statements; a fellow Liberal MP stated that he had alerted Hussen before the news broke.¹ In 2023 Global News reported that his office had given at least 93,050 dollars in public-relations work to a firm run by the sister of one of his senior ministerial staffers.¹

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