Family is the guidepost for Charest campaign co-chair Tasha Kheiriddin

The current federal Conservative leadership campaign may well be remembered as a study of contrasts, not only between the candidates—Pierre Poilievre, who’s drawing crowds of those disaffected with the Liberal government, and Jean Charest, who appeals to moderate Conservatives in favour of their party taking more of a big-tent approach—but also the two formidable women playing consequential roles in their campaigns.

Jenni Byrne—Poilievre’s (Carleton, Ont.) key adviser whom The Hill Times recently profiled—has wielded tremendous behind-the-scenes influence in helping Stephen Harper and Doug Ford form majority governments at the federal and provincial level. But she eschews media interview requests, and as a result, not many Canadians—beyond the Parliamentary Precinct—know much about her.

Perhaps more name-recognizable is Tasha Kheiriddin, a principal at Toronto-based Navigator Ltd., who serves as co-chair (alongside Rubicon Strategy Group co-founder and executive chairman Michael Coates) of Charest’s leadership campaign.

Tasha Kheiriddin’s parents, Fareez Jamil Kheiriddin, right, and Rita Dieckmann, left. Photograph courtesy of Tasha Kheiriddin

As a political commentator, the 51-year-old Kheiriddin has a familiar byline as a columnist with the National Post, and a familiar face as a frequent guest on CTV News Channel, CBC News and Radio-Canada. Yet beyond her media profile, which includes stints as host of the former CPAC Supreme Court of Canada series, Legal Talk, and host of CTV News Channel’s former weekday series, National Affairs, Kheiriddin’s personal story is not widely known.

“I’ve never been interviewed about my life,” the Montreal native said in agreeing to talk with The Hill Times. “There’s a lot to tell.”

With a name like Kheiriddin, the daughter of German immigrants spent most of her life thinking she had Turkish ancestry.

It wasn’t until shortly before her father died—at the age of 87 on Boxing Day 2012 following a battle with Alzheimer’s disease—that she come to know the truth from family members about his background.

In his obituary, he is named Fareez Jamil Kheiriddin. However, his name at birth was Siegfried Bergner.

Forced to enlist in the German Army during the Second World War before finishing high school, Bergner was dispatched to Italy and then Egypt, where he was captured by Allied forces.

“He escaped from a POW camp and never went back to his unit. He did not want to rejoin the Nazis and didn’t go back to Germany,” said Kheiriddin.

Her father took what is now her family name and settled in Iran, where he got married and converted to Islam.

Family is what motivates Tasha Kheiriddin, left, beside her daughter Zara, Jean Charest, and his wife, Michèle at a Laval, Quebec campaign event on March 24. Photograph courtesy of Tasha Kheiriddin

When his wife died, he joined her daughter from a previous marriage in Canada in the late 1960s, where he met Kheiriddin’s mother, Rita Dieckmann, whose father, Kurt, supported the German resistance and took in American soldiers during the war.

For three months in 1944, as bombs fell, the Dieckmann family lived in the basement crawl space of their house where they hid Allied soldiers who parachuted out of their planes.

“My mother’s mother, [Augusta] was also part Jewish and nobody knew,” added Kheiriddin.

She said her father had $2 in his pocket when he came to Canada, settling in Montreal where he worked as a dishwasher at a Canadian Pacific hotel. Her mother was a domestic maid and later became a teacher. “My father put her through school,” said Kheiriddin, who added that her dad went on to become a life insurance agent.

“We lived in this little house on the South Shore of Montreal. We were not well off at all. But my parents sacrificed because they believed in the sense of family—and also me—and put me through private school,” she said. “They only had one kid because they couldn’t afford more.”

Politics often came up at the dinner table, and Kheiriddin—as a young teenager—became entranced by the conservative titans of the day.

Tasha Kheiriddin, right, and her friend Joanne, in school, where they had a ‘secret Tory club of two people,’ Kheiriddin said. Photograph courtesy of Tasha Kheiriddin

“When Ronald Reagan came along in 1980, that really did capture my imagination a lot—the idea that he was going to build ‘a shining city upon a hill,’ a new perspective that Republicans valorized work and personal responsibility and also a smaller government,” she recalled.

“I remember when Margaret Thatcher won in the U.K. [in 1979] and I was very excited and I wrote her a letter. She never wrote back to me. But she was a woman and a prime minister and she was a Conservative.”

At the age of 14, Kheiriddin dipped her toe into conservative organizing when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives were running to form the next government in the 1984 federal election. Her father, who had previously voted Liberal, was asked by a work colleague to help out with the campaign of Robert Layton (future federal NDP leader Jack Layton’s father), who ran and won the former Quebec riding of Lachine-Lac-Saint-Louis and ended up serving as minister of state for mines in Mulroney’s cabinet.

Too busy to hop onto the campaign trail, the elder Kheiriddin asked his daughter whether she would be interested in working on Layton’s election bid.

“It was the summer and I went to the campaign office—and I was hooked,” she said. “After years of Liberal rule, there was a sense of change in the air and Mulroney was really a unifier.”

Kheiriddin said she also discovered “a sense of community” and “found her tribe” when she became a member of the PC Youth Federation, for which she would serve as national president from 1994 to 1997.

“I was always a really nerdy kid. I never really had many friends. I was tiny; my nickname in high school was ‘Shrimp’ because I was the shortest kid in Grades 7 and 8,” said Kheiriddin, who eventually shot up to five-foot-eight.

While heading up the federal Tories’ youth wing, she got to work closely with the party’s national leader, Jean Charest, the first francophone to hold that post.

Nearly 30 years later, Kheiriddin is hoping he will make history again as the next federal Conservative leader.

But earlier this year, she herself considered running for the Conservatives’ top job when party members thought she might have the right stuff, given the Conservative vision Kheiriddin outlined in her latest, and second, book.

It is entitled The Right Path: How Conservatives can unite, inspire and take Canada forward. She began writing it following last year’s federal election and it is scheduled to be released by Optimum Publishing International on July 5.

When Erin O’Toole was ousted as Conservative leader in February and a leadership race was triggered, the book shifted to also include a look at the future of a party bifurcated between those who wish to take it down a populist path (Poilievre’s camp) or follow the more traditional big-tent approach, advocated by Charest, Patrick Brown—and Kheiriddin.

She spoke to O’Toole before Christmas about running as a Conservative candidate in the next federal election. But at the time, Kheiriddin never thought about one day running to replace him as leader.

When the job became vacant, she began receiving messages from Conservatives—especially from the party’s Quebec parliamentary caucus—encouraging her to enter the contest as a candidate.

“I had been out of active politics for 20 years—but I stayed in the movement,” said Kheiriddin, who at the age of 29, embarked on a career blended with public policy—with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Montreal Economic Institute and the Fraser Institute—and political commentary.

She formally joined the Conservative Party, assembled a team “and all of a sudden we had hundreds of volunteers. It was a full-fledged campaign. We could have gone ahead,” said Kheiriddin, a McGill University law graduate who spent the summers working for Mulroney-era cabinet ministers Barbara McDougall and Bernard Valcourt and who began her career as a litigator in Montreal.

At the same time, she also spoke to her longtime colleague and friend, Charest, and discovered that as fellow centre-right moderates from Quebec, they were “fishing in the same pond” of ideas and potential donors.

In February, Kheiriddin announced that she would not run as a leadership candidate. The following month, Charest launched his campaign with Kheiriddin on board to help shape his policy platform.

“I believe he would be a fantastic leader. He’s a consensus-builder,” she said, noting that she also recognized the importance of “party loyalties and the family aspect of politics” in shaping her decision not to contest the leadership this time around.

“Running now would not have been the right choice,” said Kheiriddin, who added that there are over 1,500 Charest supporters selling party memberships across the country. “To build a really strong team, where you have people willing to go to the mat for you, takes time. You can’t come in as a carpetbagger—like Michael Ignatieff for the Liberals, or Kevin O’Leary, [who ran for the federal Tory leadership in 2017].”

Tasha Kheiriddin, wearing the PC shirt, and the 1993 Youth for Charest crew. Kheiriddin was national youth chair on Charest’s leadership campaign at the time, and now, she is co-chair for his leadership campaign. Photograph courtesy of Tasha Kheiriddin

Longtime Conservative strategist Yan Plante said he encouraged Kheiriddin to run for the leadership and is disappointed that she is not.

“She has a lot to bring to the Conservative race. She’s respected, she’s smart, she has strong ideas and she is not shy to defend them. She’s a woman, she has roots in Montreal, she lives in Toronto, she’s bilingual, she can debate in both languages very strongly,” said Plante, the Ottawa-based vice-president of public-relation firm, Tact, and a former chief of staff to Harper cabinet minister Denis Lebel from 2008 to 2015. “I thought she could be a very good candidate—not that I think she could win, but that she could position herself as someone any future Conservative prime minister would want in cabinet.”

He said that although Kheiriddin and Charest appeal to the same party voter base, she would have been able to attract new members that he cannot, such as women and more socially moderate, yet fiscal conservatives, or those “looking for a new face,” as opposed to those who would favour Charest’s experience, as both heading a federal party and a provincial government—in this case, Quebec.

Should Poilievre take the leadership, Kheiriddin could also be sidelined from his office by backing Charest, which would not have been the case had she run as a candidate and ran “a respectful campaign,” said Plante, who played a senior role in three federal Conservative election campaigns, including in 2015, as the lead in prepping Harper for the election debates.

She is keeping an eye on Poilievre’s campaign, and attended his April 19 rally in Toronto at the Steam Whistle brewery, which later issued a letter to media disassociating itself from the Ottawa MP’s “political views.”

Kheiriddin was also there because, as she offered, she is writing a book on the party’s future.

“The three themes that got the standing ovations were defund the CBC; bitcoin is fantastic, and end vaccine mandates,” she said of the leadership front-runner’s speech. “But it was not a political crowd.”

It was more of a group “demonizing the elites in their own party,” not unlike the people drawn to the People’s Party of Canada, explained Kheiriddin, who interviewed a couple of attendees for her book.

“This is the Poilievre Party of Canada—the PPC—and the word ‘conservative’ was not mentioned once during the entire night,” she said, noting former federal Conservative minister John Baird was in attendance.

“This is what Donald Trump did in the U.S.—using the Republican Party as a vehicle for his championing of the disaffected,” said Kheiriddin.

“I’m not saying Pierre is Trump in the sense of policies, but his style definitely is the same sense of riding a movement with people upset about various things.”

“If that gets him the leadership, I question how that is going to impact people in the party that feel alienated by the direction he has taken, because there is a large number of those people,” she said, adding that she hopes that Poilievre supporters do not comprise “an invasion of the party snatchers” in not welcoming “blue Liberals” looking to the Conservative Party as an alternative.

For Kheiriddin, the broader sense of family has fuelled her involvement in politics.

Knowing her family roots has helped shape her identity.

Having her own family grounds her.

Kheiriddin has a 12-year-old daughter from a past relationship with L. Ian MacDonald, the publisher and editor of Policy Magazine.

Athletic and artistic and an A-student, Zara has Asperger syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum and is normally characterized by difficulties in social interaction.

“She sees things outside the box and is good at reading people, and takes me out of my comfort zone,” said Kheiriddin.

“She’s made me a better person and made me more empathetic.”

The Hill Times