The 38-year-old will be the first ethnic minority to lead a major federal party in the country.<\/p>\n
In the left-wing party\u2019s leadership race, Mr Singh won a decisive first-ballot victory over three other candidates.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, New Democrats. The run for prime minister begins now,\u201d he tweeted.<\/p>\n
He now has the difficult task of rebuilding the party that lost 59 seats in the 2015 election.<\/p>\n
Mr Singh finished well ahead of his rivals with 53.6% of the vote in Sunday’s leadership contest.<\/p>\n
Mr Singh called the win an “incredibly profound honour” and said, \u201cthis race has renewed excitement in our party.\u201d<\/p>\n
A video which recently emerged in which Mr Singh responded to a heckler during a campaign rally also boosted his profile amongst the public in the lead up to the election.<\/p>\n
Christopher Cochrane, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said: \u201cHis skill, in being able to defuse the situation, it understandably appealed to a lot of people who ended up supporting him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The New Democratic Party, which has never held power, is currently the third place party in Canada’s Parliament, with 44 of 338 seats.<\/p>\n
The left-of-centre party made historic gains in the 2011 general election and was catapulted into Official Opposition, only to lose almost a million votes – mostly to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals – four years later in the 2015 election.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Trudeau congratulated his new political rival on Twitter saying: \u201cI look forward to speaking soon and working together for Canadians.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Sunday, Mr Singh he would focus on issues of climate change, reconciliation with indigenous peoples, and electoral reform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sikh politician Jagmeet Singh has been picked by Canada\u2019s federal New Democrat party to lead their party into the next general election. The 38-year-old will be the first ethnic minority to lead a major federal party in the country. In the left-wing party\u2019s leadership race, Mr Singh won a decisive first-ballot victory over three other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":24256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,40,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-politics-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}