Some people watch a bunch of kids playing basketball and see future professional athletes or Olympians. Raj Grewal sees future members of Parliament.

“Maybe one day, one of these kids will wind up representing Brampton, which I think will be the cooler story,” says Grewal, the rookie Liberal MP for Brampton East, who sets aside almost every Sunday afternoon to play pickup basketball with as many as 150 young people at the Gore Meadows Community Centre. It’s become an incredibly popular pastime for many Brampton youth, with occasional guest appearances from other politicians, such as Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan.

“I don’t want to force anything upon any of them,” Grewal says. “I just want to provide them with a venue to play basketball, and anything that comes out of that is a bonus for me.”

The link between basketball and politics is not such a long shot.

About 15 years ago, when he was just a teenager, Grewal met a young fellow named Navdeep Bains on a basketball court. Bains, planning a 2004 run for office, gained an enthusiastic volunteer. Grewal acquired a mentor and, now, a friend and colleague in Parliament.

Bains managed to win a few elections (though he lost in 2011) and now he’s the minister of innovation, science and economic development. Grewal is learning the ropes, as a backbencher on the government benches.

Grewal, 30, has been playing a long game ever since he met Bains. After graduating from Wilfrid Laurier University, he set his sights on a joint degree in law and business. It was an expensive dream — Grewal estimates that it cost him $150,000 to get the degree from the Schulich School of Business and Osgoode Hall Law School — but it netted him a well-paying job on Bay Street.

And yet, barely a year after getting that dream job, Grewal decided to pursue another one — in elected politics, looking to become an MP in the suburbs outside Toronto where he was raised.

Some of his new Bay Street colleagues thought he was crazy. They told him at least to wait until he was more established. They wondered why he’d want to run for a party that was promising to increase government spending.

“The conversation I had with partners was ‘Yes, you will be paying more tax on your income. But what type of country do you want your kids to grow up in?’” Grewal says. “The Canada that I know is the Canada that gives this guy the chance to sit beside you at this firm.”

When he says “this guy,” Grewal is talking about himself. He is the son of a man who immigrated to Canada from India a few decades ago, settling first in Cranbrook, B.C., and then in Calgary, earning his living driving taxis. Not long after Grewal’s parents had started their family, however, they were confronted with a not-so-small disaster: a bureaucratic screw-up that threatened to see Grewal’s father deported to India, forced to leave his young family behind.

The story, fortunately, had a happy ending. Thanks to some help from an MP at the time, the deportation order was lifted. The family stayed intact and moved to Brampton, where Grewal’s dad earned a living for 20 years as an airport cab driver. Grewal, who still lives with his parents, says that his family has never forgotten how politics changed their lives.

Not surprisingly, Grewal says his biggest moment so far as an MP came when he was able to help people in a similar situation — a father facing deportation, the government threatening to tear him away from his young family. With Grewal’s help, and after many long weeks of wading through red tape with Immigration, the deportation order was rescinded.

“For me, the story came full circle that day,” Grewal says.

While he was relieved at that success, Grewal is finding that he’s still bothered by the people he can’t help.

“The bureaucracy is tough,” he says. “It’s not as responsive as the private sector. Coming from mergers and acquisitions, where everything is go, go, go … here, well, I wouldn’t say it doesn’t move. It just moves slowly.”

But Grewal is not sorry he made the leap, and he’s still glad he met Bains on that basketball court a long time ago.

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Asked about the best advice he’s received from his mentor lately, Grewal has two answers: “Keep your head down and work hard … And another thing is to enjoy the moment, because we’re very fortunate to have this opportunity and we need to recognize that it’s not going to last forever. You work hard, try to do as much good as you can for people, and then you pass on the baton.”

And as he says, you never know — the baton might just be passed to one of those kids playing basketball with him every Sunday.

House-trained is a summer series on new Ontario MPs. sdelacourt@bell.net

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