Who is Jagmeet Singh, Canada's NDP leader?

A former human rights activist and lawyer, Singh was elected leader of the New Democratic Party in 2017

Jagmeet Singh is the first ethnic minority politician to lead a major federal party in Canada. But what role will he have in the country's next government?

Singh is running his third federal election campaign - and one where his party faces an uphill battle as recent polls show some of the lowest levels of support for Canada's left-wing New Democratic Party in years.

The NDP faces tough competition in Canada's 2025 election which is being held on 28 April. Prime Minister Mark Carney called it shortly after he was sworn in to replace former leader Justin Trudeau.

Launching his party's campaign, Singh attacked both Carney and US President Donald Trump, promising that only the New Democrats could be trusted to look out for ordinary Canadians.

A practising Sikh, Singh is a former provincial Ontario legislator and lawyer by training. The 46-year-old took the helm of the party in 2017 despite no previous experience in federal politics.

In 2022, Singh's NDP agreed to help prop up Trudeau's minority Liberal government in exchange for support on their shared political priorities, in particular in developing a national dental care programme for low-income Canadians and a national prescription drug programme.

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But last September, the NDP became the last of Canada's three main opposition parties to turn on Trudeau, with Singh accusing him of "caving" to corporate greed.

The NDP leader has also made headlines for confronting hecklers. He once approached a man who was heckling him with insults on Parliament Hill, asking him to "say it to my face" in a clip that later went viral.

He has faced other confrontations in the past, including a voter who told him to "cut your turban off" during the 2019 election campaign - though he handled that situation cordially, replying that Canadians "look like all sorts of people" before walking away.

Singh was born in Scarborough, Ontario, a city in the Greater Toronto Area, to Indian immigrants from the state of Punjab.

Singh has said he was sexually abused by a taekwondo teacher as a child, revealing in a memoir later in life that he suffered the abuse while growing up in Windsor.

As a child, he also spent time in St Johns, and attended school across the border in Michigan for several years. He later got a degree in biology from the University of Western Ontario and a Bachelor of Laws from York University's Osgoode Hall Law School.

Singh worked as a criminal defence attorney for years before pursuing provincial politics, eventually running provincially for a seat in the Ontario legislature in 2011.

In 2019, he won his first seat in Canada's parliament in by-election - or special election - in Burnaby, British Columbia, east of Vancouver.

The former human rights activist ran on pledges to forgive student loan debt, to drastically reduce Canada's carbon emissions and to ensure universal prescription drug coverage.

He has found a large audience on TikTok and is also known for his style and well-tailored suits, with BuzzFeed once calling him the "most stylish politician in Canada by like a million kilometres".

He is married to fashion designer Gurkiran Kaur Sidhu, with whom he has two children.