Ratna Omidvar

Ratna Omidvar was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2016, representing Ontario, and brought to the role a distinguished career in immigration policy, settlement services, and civil society leadership. She came to Canada as a refugee from Iran, built a career directing Maytree — one of Canada's most respected foundations working on immigration and diversity policy — and has brought that institutional experience directly to bear in her Senate work. Her focus in the Senate has been immigration, refugee policy, settlement services, and the civic integration of newcomers — files where her personal and professional biography give her a legitimacy and depth that most senators cannot match. She has been active on the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology and has pursued amendments to immigration and refugee legislation with the kind of technical knowledge that comes from years of direct policy engagement. The particular value of her Senate work is its combination of policy expertise and civic perspective — she is genuinely interested in the question of what makes immigration work, not just for immigrants but for the communities that receive them, and she brings that both-sides framing to debates that can otherwise become politically binary. At a moment when Canadian immigration has become one of the most politically contested policy files — with legitimate debates about volumes, settlement resources, housing demand, and labour market integration — her ability to engage with the complexity rather than the partisanship of the debate is unusually valuable.