Mohamed Boudjenane
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Mohamed Boudjenane is a journalist and politician in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is currently Executive Director of the Canadian Arab Federation.
[edit] Career
Born in Morocco, Boudjenane came to Canada at the age of 20 to study international economics and communications at Laval University. During this time he worked at Quebec City's City Hall and was a reporter and board director for the local campus radio station, CKRL-FM. After graduating from Laval in 1989, Boudjenane moved to Ontario to become a political advisor and then executive assistant to the Minister of Transportation and Francophone Affairs, where he spent four years working on a broad set of policy issues for the provincial government.
In 1995, Boudjenane joined the provincial broadcaster TFO as bureau chief for the Ontario Legislative Assembly. For the next ten years he covered Ontario politics for Ontario’s leading Francophone public affairs program, Panorama. He was also a regular panelist discussing provincial political affairs for CBLA's Metro Morning, and he contributed pieces to CBC Radio’s Dispatches, as well as the Moroccan segment of an award-winning documentary on terrorist networks that was co-produced internationally by CBC, the New York Times, and PBS.
Boudjenane's work in the area of anti-racism, civil liberties and human rights has included memberships on the Toronto Chief of Police’s Advisory Council and the Executive of the National Antiracism Canadian Coalition. He has made public presentations to the Arar Public Enquiry and to federal parliamentary committees examining Bill c36, the anti-terrorism legislation.
Mohamed also served as vice-president of both the l’Association Canadienne Francaise de l’Ontario (ACFO) and the Canadian Media Guild at TV Ontario. He has presented to the Heritage Committee on the future of public television, and, as past-president for the French Community Radio in Toronto, led a successful lobbying effort to create CHOQ-FM, the first French-language community radio station in the city.
[edit] Candidate for NDP Nomination in Parkdale—High Park
In 2006, Boudjenane sought the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) nomination to run in the forthcoming Parkdale—High Park by-election to replace outgoing Ontario Liberal Party Member of Provincial Parliament Gerard Kennedy. Kennedy, a former Minister of Education in the Ontario Liberal government headed by Premier Dalton McGuinty, resigned both his cabinet post and his seat in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to seek the Liberal Party of Canada leadership, necessitating the by-election. Boudjenane was defeated for the NDP nomination by United Church minister Cheri DiNovo.
