A few year ago, I received a telephone call from Ottawa that said that the Right Honourable Mr. Justin Trudeau would like to come to our house in Montreal for dinner the next day. I was incredibly surprised to have received this news. It was difficult for me to believe that a man of his stature wanted to visit the house of a ‘small’ man like me. During the next 24 hours we worked hard to prepare my house for the distinguished visitor and his entourage, including our present Minister Marc Miller and his wife. I also invited a few members of the Bangladeshi community of Montreal and a few student tenants of mine to have dinner with Mr. Trudeau. We prepared genuine Bangladeshi food for our guests. Our house and its surroundings were filled with the members of the RCMP.    

Before dinner I gave a speech on the significance of ‘Id al-Adha, the festival of Sacrifice that we were going to celebrate at that time. In his speech Justin Trudeau said that Canada and Canadians are indebted to the new Canadians like those from Bangladesh not only because they came with a great deal of knowledge and skill but also because they enriched Canada with the cultural heritage that they brought with them.

I sat next to Justin (I always call him by his first name because I knew him since he was a child. His family and I lived at the same McGill University neighbourhood of Montreal.) at the dinner table. While eating I told him about a problem of the Bangladeshi community of Canada. I told him that the parents of girls in Bangladesh do not want to give their daughters in marriage to Canadian young men because it took up to three years for their married daughters to come to Canada to be with their husbands. The fact that the newly wed women had to stay away from their husbands for that long time was socially unacceptable in Bangladesh. Justin listened to me carefully, and the next day he declared on television that the spouses of Canadians would be brought to Canada immediately after their marriage.