Honourable senators, I am delighted to rise today to speak in support of Bill S-246, An Act Respecting Lebanese Heritage Month. I speak quite selfishly, since Senator Cordy’s bill gives me such a wonderful opportunity to share with you more of the Alberta history that I love.

I want to take you back to 1905 — the year Alberta entered Confederation. The province was booming with the arrival of waves of pioneer settlers. In 1901, the population of Alberta had been just 73,000. By 1905, it had more than doubled to 160,000.

Among the newcomers to arrive that year was young Alexander Hamilton. No, not the $10 founding father without a father Alexander Hamilton; not the American revolutionary immortalized in rap by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m talking about Alberta’s Alexander Hamilton, whose adventure story is no less amazing.

Our Alexander Hamilton, who was born Ali Ahmed Abouchadi, arrived in Alberta in 1905 from his home in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. He was just 12 years old.

He and his uncle Sine Abouchadi came to Alberta via Winnipeg, hoping to strike it rich in the Klondike gold fields. Finding themselves almost a decade late for the gold rush, they decided to become travelling fur traders instead, buying pelts from Cree and Métis trappers around Lac La Biche and then selling them in Edmonton.

When young Ali was just 16, his uncle decided to go back to Lebanon, leaving the teenager alone to make his own way on the western frontier. But Ali, who changed his name at that point to Alexander, made his fortune — and I do mean his fortune — as a fur trader, merchant, farmer, cattle salesman and finally as one of Alberta’s first dealer of Ford automobiles. He was one of the first Lebanese pioneers to settle in Alberta. Immigrants: they get the job done.

Hamilton was soon followed by a wave of others from the Bekaa Valley, some of them inspired by his early successes. There were Hamdons and Tarrabains, Shabens and Saddys, Mouallems and Kazeils and Chadis, Awids and Johmas and Amereys, Haymours and Salloums and Darwishes — cousins, friends, in-laws and neighbours who emigrated, one after the other, from small Lebanese villages such as Lala, Qab Elias and Kherbet Rouha.

Peddlers and shopkeepers, fur merchants and farmers, ranchers and restaurateurs, they left their homes half a world away to become settlers on a vast new frontier.

For the Indigenous peoples of Alberta, this wave of settlement in the wake of the treaties was a profoundly difficult and unjust time. But the Lebanese newcomers learned Cree and Dene and forged strong bonds of friendship with the First Nations and Métis people they met as they built new lives for themselves as traders and merchants in Lac La Biche, Fort Chipewyan, Fort McMurray, Athabasca and High Prairie, plying the rivers to the north in the Northwest Territories in search of the best furs.

When you think of fur traders, homesteaders and ranchers — Alberta pioneers — Lebanese immigrants might not be the first people who come to mind. But there were Lebanese settlers in Alberta from the very moment it became a province. They laid the foundation for the vibrant, multicultural province we were to become. Without their contributions, Alberta would not be the province we know today.

The first to arrive were single men, but the women soon followed and left their mark on their new homeland. There were women such as the formidable Hilwie Jomha Hamdon. Born in 1905 in Lebanon, Hilwie moved to northern Alberta as a bride of 17 to join her husband, Ali Hamdon, a successful fur trader who greeted her, on her arrival, with a full-length sable coat.

The couple spent their early married life in Fort Chipewyan, a primarily First Nations community in the north of the province. There, Hilwie formed enduring friendships with her Indigenous neighbours, learning to speak both Cree and Chipewyan. An Edmonton Journal story from 1964 reported that one of the local chiefs had dubbed her “the finest white woman in the North.”

Hilwie hosted visiting celebrity bush pilots, including “Wop” May and “Punch” Dickins, in her home. But, as their family grew, Hilwie wanted a better education for their six children and insisted that they all move to Edmonton, where she soon became a leader in the capital’s growing Lebanese community.

You may already know that Edmonton was home to Canada’s first mosque, the Al Rashid. You might not have known that it was Hilwie Hamdon who led the charm offensive that got that mosque built.

She convinced Edmonton’s then-mayor John Fry that the city should donate the land. Then she convinced Muslims and Arabs all across Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as Edmontonians of all faiths and backgrounds, to donate to the mosque and raised the necessary $5,000 to pay for construction.

The mosque was built by Ukrainian-Canadian contractor Mike Drewoth. Mike had never seen a mosque, so he designed the Al Rashid to look like a Ukrainian church, complete with those distinctive signature “onion domes” that mark eastern Christian churches — one onion bulb atop each minaret. You could hardly imagine a more uniquely Edmonton building than one that fused Lebanese and Ukrainian culture and aesthetics into a harmonious whole.

The original Al Rashid opened in 1938 and stands today in Fort Edmonton Park, Edmonton’s living history museum, where young Muslim guides provide tours and programming through the summer, teaching tourists and reminding Edmontonians about our city’s deep Lebanese and Muslim roots. In 2017, the Edmonton Public School Board opened Hilwie Hamdon School, named in honour of this remarkable Edmonton champion of education and inclusion.

While many of Alberta’s early Lebanese settlers were Muslim, others were Christian or Druze, and certainly not all of them were northern fur traders.

Isper Shacker, for example, got his start in the small Alberta town of Hanna, where he ran the local movie theatre. He would later go on to become the Mayor of Hanna. And though he himself was Christian, not Muslim, he travelled to Edmonton and attended the opening of the Al Rashid Mosque as a special guest of honour.

William Haddad, the son of Lebanese shopkeeper Abdelnoor Farhat Haddad, graduated from law school at the University of Alberta in 1941, becoming one of Canada’s first Lebanese lawyers. He served in the navy during the Second World War, became president of the Edmonton Bar Association, the first chair of the Edmonton Police Commission, vice-chair of the Alberta Securities Commission and finally a judge on the Court of Appeal of Alberta — one of the first Arab judges in Canada.

In keeping with such legal traditions, just last month, Edmonton lawyer and community leader Bob Aloneissi, the son of Lebanese immigrants, was appointed to the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta, becoming, I do believe, Alberta’s first Druze judge.

Of course, the first Lebanese pioneers were joined in Alberta by later waves of immigrants in the 1950s and the 1970s and continuing to this day.

By 1969, the Muslim population in Lac La Biche made up about 10% of the town’s total population, the largest proportion of Muslims in any town or city in North America at that time. Today, one in six people in Lac La Biche can claim Lebanese roots, and the town claims it has the highest proportion of Lebanese Canadians in the country.

Alberta certainly has, by far, the largest Lebanese population outside of Quebec and Ontario. This has, perhaps, given Albertans — especially Edmontonians — a disproportionate passion for hummus and donair.

The Edmonton novelist Todd Babiak — not Lebanese himself — once wrote that it was impossible to have a party of any kind in Edmonton without someone bringing hummus. Now, Ottawa may think it has cornered the market on shawarma, and Halifax might think it can claim the donair, but Edmonton has something to say about that.

Alberta, though, can certainly claim the Lebanese-inflected Burger Baron mushroom burger, recently immortalized by the award-winning Edmonton author, journalist and documentary maker Omar Mouallem, in his film, The Last Baron, which tracked the social history of Lebanese immigration via the stories of the Burger Baron restaurants that were, and are, landmarks across the Prairies.

Less calorically, Alberta will also proudly claim Canada’s first Lebanese cabinet minister, Larry Shaben, who served with distinction in the cabinets of premiers Peter Lougheed and Don Getty, and who was the first Muslim appointed to any provincial or federal cabinet in Canada.

Notably, while commuting north to his riding in High Prairie, Larry Shaben survived a horrific small-plane crash that killed six people, including his friend and colleague, the Alberta NDP leader Grant Notley, father of Rachel Notley. The story of Shaben’s extraordinary escape, not just from death in the crash but from death in the freezing northern wilderness, was told in the award-winning book Into the Abyss, written by acclaimed Lebanese-Canadian journalist Carol Shaben — Larry Shaben’s own daughter.

Edmonton was also home to Canada’s first-ever Muslim judge, Ed Saddy, the proud son of Lebanese immigrants, and one of my dad’s oldest friends. They grew up together on Edmonton’s Boyle Street, where Lebanese and Jewish kids shared a special bond.

Today, Alberta’s Lebanese community — Muslim, Christian, Druze or decidedly secular — is stronger than ever, whether its members are newly arrived immigrants or fourth-generation Albertans.

Those deep, deep roots are among the reasons that the Edmonton Public School Board currently offers Arabic bilingual immersion programs at six of its public schools.

They’re the reason the Edmonton Journal recently reported that there are nearly 120 shops and restaurants in Edmonton with “donair” as part of their name, which, in the words of Postmedia columnist Chad Huculak, “. . . dwarfs Calgary’s minuscule 50 and Toronto’s less than 20.”

And they’re the reason Edmonton is proudly home to the Canadian Druze Centre and a significant population of the Druze diaspora in North America.

I guess you might say every month in Alberta is Lebanese heritage month. But I don’t think anyone back home will object to having an excuse, every November, to celebrate, and I’ll bring the hummus.

To Senator Cordy, I say thank you, hiy hiy and šukran.

Yes, I think you did miss it. It opened in 1938 in downtown Edmonton on a gift of land from the City of Edmonton with $5,000 raised from communities across the West. I have to say, the original mosque was moved brick by brick and now stands in Fort Edmonton, but the Al Rashid Mosque endures as one of the largest mosques in Western Canada, throwing open its doors in times of fire and disaster. The Al Rashid Mosque has been remarkable for welcoming the homeless during cold snaps and for opening its doors to people who were fleeing the Fort McMurray wildfires. It’s an extraordinarily important part of Edmonton’s cultural and social community.

If I have time, absolutely.

Absolutely. I think those first Lebanese pioneers laid down a foundation that has allowed Muslim immigrants from around the world to come and find a home in Edmonton, whether they are coming from North Africa, East Africa or Indonesia. Wherever Muslims have come from to Edmonton, the Al Rashid Mosque community has been there to welcome them.

You mentioned Lila Fahlman. I didn’t raise her in my speech for one reason, which is that her family was Syrian rather than Lebanese. I know the border is liminal, but as this was about Lebanese heritage month, I wanted to focus on Hilwie Hamdon, who was the remarkable woman who fought for the Al Rashid Mosque, which was, indeed, the first mosque in Canada.

Interestingly enough, the first mosque in North America was, I believe, in North Dakota and not in Chicago or New York as you might have expected. There was really an important Lebanese diaspora that came and filled up that whole prairie west on both sides of the Canadian-American border.