Althia Raj
Althia Raj is a Canadian political journalist and a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. She is the Ottawa Bureau Chief for HuffPost Canada and also manages the news site's Quebec City bureau and hosts and produces Follow-Up, a HuffPost Canada Politics podcast. Her team has held live town halls with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Heritage Minister Melanie Joly.
Prior to joining HuffPost in August 2011, Raj worked as a national political reporter for Postmedia News and has also reported from Parliament Hill for Sun Media and has been a producer for CTV and for CBC Radio's weekly national political magazine, The House.
Raj is also a regular panellist on CBC News Network's Power & Politics programme and has appeared as a panellist on At Issue on CBC's The National as well as on various CPAC programs.
In 2016, Raj was in conflict with Senator Leo Housakos when she named him as the source of a leak regarding the Senate's spending audit the previous year. Housakos replied by accusing Raj of conducting a smear campaign against him and demanded an apology when she accused him of lying.
On February 28, 2018, Raj moderated the second all-candidates debate for the 2018 Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leadership election.
Before becoming a journalist, Raj worked at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. She later worked at the Canadian Mission to the United Nations in New York City. She's written an e-book called Contender: The Justin Trudeau Story.
She was one of the moderators at an English-language debate during the 2019 Canadian federal election campaign.