Anita Anandਅਨੀਤਾ ਆਨੰਦ

Anita Anand (born 20 May 1967) is a Canadian politician, lawyer and former law professor who has been Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs since 13 May 2025. Born in Kentville, Nova Scotia, to Indian immigrant parents, her mother from Punjab and her father from Tamil Nadu, she was a leading scholar of corporate governance before she entered Parliament in 2019, and she has since held seven cabinet portfolios, including procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic and national defence during the first phase of the war in Ukraine.

Early life in Kentville

Anita Indira Anand was born on 20 May 1967 in Kentville, a small town in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. Her parents were both Indian physicians who immigrated to Canada in the early 1960s and settled in Kentville. Her mother, Saroj D. Ram, was an anesthesiologist from Punjab, and her father, S. V. (Andy) Anand, was a general surgeon from Tamil Nadu. She has two sisters: Gita Anand, an employment lawyer in Toronto, and Sonia Anand, a physician and researcher at McMaster University. Anand identifies as both a Tamil Canadian and a Punjabi Canadian, reflecting the two sides of her family heritage.

Four degrees and a career in law

Anand enrolled at Queen's University in 1985 and earned a Bachelor of Arts in political studies. She then studied at Wadham College, Oxford, taking a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in jurisprudence, returned to Nova Scotia for a Bachelor of Laws at Dalhousie University, and completed a Master of Laws at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1996. She was called to the Ontario Bar in 1994 and worked as an associate at the Toronto firm Torys from 1994 to 1997, after articling there.

Her academic career began at Western University, where she was an assistant professor (adjunct) from 1997 to 1999, and continued at Queen's University from 1999, where she gained tenure as an associate professor in 2003 and won the Queen's Law Students' Society Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2004. In 2005 to 2006 she was a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Olin Scholar at Yale Law School, teaching comparative corporate governance. From 2006 she was a full Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, holding the J. R. Kimber Chair in Investor Protection and Corporate Governance. She served as Associate Dean of the JD program from 2007 to 2009 and, from 2010 to 2019, as Academic Director of the Centre for the Legal Profession and its Program on Ethics in Law and Business. She was also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, a Visiting Scholar at the Bank of Canada in 2009 to 2010, the inaugural Chair of the Ontario Securities Commission Investor Advisory Panel from 2010 to 2012, and president of the Canadian Law and Economics Association from 2009 to 2011. Her research, on the regulation of capital markets, corporate governance, enforcement and systemic risk, was recognised in 2019 with the Royal Society of Canada's Yvan Allaire Medal for outstanding contributions to the governance of private and public organisations.

What did Anita Anand do during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Anand entered politics in 2019. On 12 June 2019 she won the Liberal nomination for Oakville, defeating former provincial minister Kevin Flynn on the first ballot, and on 21 October 2019 she was elected MP for Oakville with 30,265 votes. A month later, on 20 November 2019, she entered cabinet as Minister of Public Services and Procurement and Receiver General for Canada, just before the pandemic reached Canada.

In that job she ran the federal buying effort for the pandemic. Her department pursued an aggressive procurement strategy across many suppliers to secure personal protective equipment in a hyper-competitive world market, and she told the House of Commons Health Committee in April 2021 that more than 2.5 billion articles of PPE had been procured, much of it made in Canada. From the summer of 2020 the government signed contracts with the producers of seven leading vaccine candidates. By the end of July 2021 Canada had received more than 66.4 million vaccine doses. She was re-elected in Oakville on 20 September 2021 with 46.1 percent of the vote.

Defence minister: culture change and Ukraine

On 26 October 2021 Anand succeeded Harjit Sajjan as Minister of National Defence, only the second woman in Canadian history, after Kim Campbell, to hold the post. She made changing the culture of the Canadian Armed Forces her first priority. On 4 November 2021 she accepted in full former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour's interim recommendation that military sexual misconduct cases be referred to the civilian justice system, gave the government's official apology to those affected on 13 December 2021, released Arbour's final report on 30 May 2022, and responded to all 48 of its recommendations on 16 December 2022, rejecting none.

Her tenure also covered the first phase of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Canada extended its Operation Unifier training mission by three years in January 2022, and Anand visited Kyiv in a show of solidarity days before the invasion. The aid she announced included M777 howitzers, a NASAMS air defence system announced on 10 January 2023 at about $406 million, 200 Roshel Senator armoured vehicles, and four Leopard 2 tanks. At home she announced a NORAD modernisation plan of about $40 billion over 20 years on 20 June 2022 and finalised the purchase of 88 F-35 fighter jets on 9 January 2023. She announced the defence elements of Canada's Indo-Pacific Strategy on 27 November 2022.

Treasury Board, transport and a change of plan

Anand became President of the Treasury Board on 26 July 2023, overseeing the management of federal spending and the public service. On 19 September 2024 she took on the Transport portfolio as well, announcing a United States preclearance facility for Toronto's Billy Bishop Airport and publishing amended Airline Passenger Protection Regulations on 21 December 2024. From 20 December 2024 she was also Minister of Internal Trade, and she led the push to cut trade barriers inside Canada, including the federal decision in February 2025 to remove more than half of the federal exceptions from the Canadian Free Trade Agreement. On 12 February 2025 she joined the announcement of Alto, the planned high-speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City.

In January 2025 she announced that she would not seek re-election and would return to academia. She then reversed that decision, endorsed Mark Carney for the Liberal leadership, and stood again. Under Carney she served briefly as Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry from 14 March 2025, and on 28 April 2025 she was re-elected, this time for the new riding of Oakville East. She and her husband John Knowlton, whom she married in 1995, live in Oakville and have four children.

How did Anita Anand become Minister of Foreign Affairs?

Anand became Minister of Foreign Affairs on 13 May 2025, succeeding Mélanie Joly in Prime Minister Mark Carney's government after the 2025 election. She is the first Hindu woman elected to Parliament in Canada and the first Hindu member of a Canadian cabinet, and the first visible minority person to serve as foreign minister. Her first year in the job was defined by crisis work and repair work: assisted departure efforts for Canadians leaving the Middle East during the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, condemnation of the killings in El Fasher, Sudan, in October 2025, and, in the same month, the first visit to India by a Canadian minister in two years, where she met Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the two countries worked to restore relations. She travelled to China with the Canadian delegation in January 2026, condemned the Iranian regime's suppression of protests that month, reaffirmed Canada's non-recognition of the Maduro regime in Venezuela on 3 January 2026, and signed a defence agreement with South Korea in February 2026.

She remains in the role through 2026. At the General Assembly of the Organization of American States in Panama in June 2026 she announced $35.3 million to support security and stability in the Americas, including help for Haiti, maritime security and Hurricane Melissa relief, and co-chaired a meeting that launched a renewed Canada-CARICOM action plan. On 20 August 2026 she met United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, D.C., where they discussed shared security priorities, cooperation against transnational fraud and scam centres, Canada's Arctic foreign policy, and support for Haitian-led efforts to restore stability.

Why Anita Anand matters

Anand's career is unusual for its range: a scholar of corporate governance who became, in turn, the minister who bought a country's pandemic supplies, the minister who tried to change its military's culture during a European war, and the minister now representing it abroad. For Punjabi Canadians her story carries a specific thread. She is the daughter of a Punjabi mother who came to Canada as a doctor in the early 1960s, and she describes herself as both Tamil Canadian and Punjabi Canadian. Her rise to one of the most senior offices in the country, from a small Nova Scotia town and a Toronto lecture hall, is part of the longer story of Punjabi families in Canada moving from immigration to the centre of public life. She remains on leave from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law for the duration of her appointment.