Omar Alghabra

Omar Alghabra (born 24 October 1969) is a Saudi-born Syrian-Canadian engineer and Liberal politician.¹ He represented Mississauga—Erindale in the House of Commons from 2006 to 2008 and Mississauga Centre from 2015 to 2025.¹ He served as Canada's minister of transport from 12 January 2021 to 26 July 2023.¹

Alghabra was born in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian family; his father, an architect, had moved the family to Saudi Arabia in 1968.¹ He moved to Toronto at the age of nineteen to attend school, completed a Bachelor of Engineering at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, and later earned a Master of Business Administration at York University.¹ He worked at Ainsworth Inc. and then at General Electric as a Six Sigma Black Belt in the industrial service business.¹ He was president of the Canadian Arab Federation in 2004–2005.¹

Alghabra entered federal politics in the 2006 election, winning Mississauga—Erindale after leaving General Electric to run.¹ He lost the seat in 2008 and again in the 2011 election, and returned to Parliament in 2015 in the new riding of Mississauga Centre.¹ He served as a parliamentary secretary from 2015 to 2019 — for consular affairs, for international trade diversification, and to the prime minister and the deputy prime minister.¹ On 12 January 2021 he was appointed minister of transport; the Arabic article notes that he was the first Canadian of Syrian origin to hold a cabinet portfolio.² On 25 July 2023 he announced that he was stepping down from cabinet and would not run in the 2025 election.¹ In January 2025 he travelled to the Middle East with International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen for meetings on Syria and the region after the fall of the Assad regime.¹

As parliamentary secretary for consular affairs, Alghabra oversaw a file of some 250,000 cases and worked with the families of the victims of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, shot down in January 2020.¹ As minister of transport he held the portfolio through the transport sector's pandemic-era crisis and its recovery.¹

The judgements in this section belong to their sources, not to the museum. After the 2017 parliamentary motion condemning Islamophobia, amid death threats directed at Muslim MPs, Alghabra stated that his primary concern was for his staff, who processed the threatening messages.¹ In 2018 a senator invoked his Saudi birthplace to question his judgement during a diplomatic dispute between Canada and Saudi Arabia, an episode The Globe and Mail later described as a slur against "a mild-mannered Muslim MP".¹

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