ਹਰਜੀਤ ਸੱਜਣਹਰਜੀਤ ਸੱਜਣ

Harjit Sajjan (born 6 September 1970) is a Canadian former politician, army officer and police detective who served as Canada's Minister of National Defence from 2015 to 2021. Born in Bombeli village in Punjab's Hoshiarpur district and raised in South Vancouver, he was the first Sikh to hold Canada's defence portfolio and the first Sikh Canadian to command a Canadian Army reserve regiment.

Early life: from Bombeli to South Vancouver

Harjit Singh Sajjan was born on 6 September 1970 in Bombeli, a village in the Hoshiarpur district of Punjab, India. His father, Kundan Singh Sajjan, was a head constable with the Punjab Police who had left for British Columbia two years earlier to work at a sawmill. In 1976, when Harjit was five, he immigrated to Canada with his mother and older sister to join his father. While the family established itself, his mother worked summers on berry farms in the Lower Mainland, where the children often joined her. Sajjan grew up in South Vancouver and was baptised as a Sikh as a teenager. He married Kuljit Kaur, a family physician, in 1996, and they have a son and a daughter.

Soldier and police detective

Sajjan joined The British Columbia Regiment (Duke of Connaught's Own) in 1989 as a trooper and was commissioned as an officer in 1991, eventually rising to lieutenant-colonel. He deployed overseas four times: once to Bosnia and Herzegovina and three times to Afghanistan. After returning from Bosnia he began an 11-year career with the Vancouver Police Department, ending it as a detective in the gang crimes unit specialising in drug trafficking and organised crime investigation, while continuing to serve as a reservist. His Sikh beard prevented the use of a standard military gas mask, so he invented his own protective hood that worked with a beard and patented it in 1996.

Afghanistan and Operation Medusa

Sajjan's best-known deployment came in 2006, when he took leave from the Vancouver police gang squad to serve in Kandahar with the 1st Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group as a liaison officer with the Afghan police. He reported that corruption in the Afghan government was driving recruitment to the Taliban, and Brigadier-General David Fraser tasked him with helping to plan aspects of Operation Medusa. Fraser praised his work in a letter to the Vancouver police, calling him the best single Canadian intelligence asset in theatre, and Sajjan was mentioned in dispatches for his counterinsurgency knowledge. He returned to Afghanistan in 2009, and again in 2010 as a special assistant to the American commander, a tour that required him to leave the police department. In 2011 he became the first Sikh to command a Canadian Army reserve regiment, The British Columbia Regiment, and in 2012 he received the Meritorious Service Medal for diluting the Taliban's influence in Kandahar Province.

How did a Vancouver detective become Canada's defence minister?

Sajjan became defence minister by winning a seat and going straight into Cabinet: he was elected for Vancouver South in the 19 October 2015 federal election, defeating the Conservative incumbent Wai Young, and on 4 November 2015 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed him Minister of National Defence, the first Sikh to hold the post. His record was not without controversy. In 2017 he apologised for describing himself as the architect of Operation Medusa, accepting that the operation's planning was collaborative and led by Fraser's team, and in 2021 the House of Commons censured him over his description of his service record and his handling of sexual misconduct in the armed forces. He was re-elected in 2019 and 2021, and briefly served as acting Minister of Veterans Affairs in early 2019.

Later cabinet roles and retirement

In the October 2021 cabinet reshuffle Sajjan moved from defence to Minister of International Development, a post he held until July 2023. He then became Minister of Emergency Preparedness and President of the King's Privy Council, alongside responsibility for the Pacific Economic Development Agency of Canada, serving until March 2025. In January 2025 he announced that he would not seek re-election, pointing to an increasingly polarised and toxic political climate and its toll on family life. His honours include appointment as an Officer of the Order of Military Merit in 2012, the Meritorious Service Medal, a mention in dispatches in 2008, and a Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award in 2016.

Legacy

Sajjan's career joined three forms of public service that rarely meet in one life: soldier, police detective and cabinet minister. For Punjabi Canadians, his appointment in 2015, a turbaned Sikh in charge of Canada's military a generation after his father worked in a British Columbia sawmill, became a defining image of how far the diaspora had travelled. His later years in Cabinet were harder, marked by the Medusa apology, censure votes, and criticism over the 2021 Kabul evacuation, which he disputed. He left Parliament in 2025 after a decade representing Vancouver South.