Nikki Pedersen (The More Things Changed)

Nimrata "Nikki" Pedersen is a Canadian Conservative politician, currently serving as Official Opposition Critic for International Trade. She has declared her candidacy in the Conservative Party leadership election in May of 2017 and is seen as a leading candidate.

Early Life and Education
Pedersen was born Nimrata Randhawa in Banff, Alberta, on January 20, 1972, to an Indian Sikh family. She was "always called Nikki, which means 'little one,' by her family." Her parents, father Ajit Singh Randhawa and mother Raj Kaur Randhawa, are immigrants from Amritsar District, Punjab, India, where Ajit had been a professor at Punjab Agricultural University and Raj had received her law degree from the University of Delhi. Haley's parents immigrated to Canada after her father received a scholarship offer from the University of British Columbia. After her father earned a PhD degree in 1969, he moved his young family to Alberta to accept a position as a professor at Mount Royal. Her mother, Raj Randhawa earned a master's degree in education and taught for seven years in the Calgary, Alberta public schools before founding her clothing shop Exotica International in 1976.

Nikki has two brothers, Mitti, a retired member of the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit who served in Desert Storm, and Charan, a web designer. She has a sister, Simran, a radio host and Fashion Institute of Technology alumna, born in Singapore.

At age 12, Nikki began helping with the bookkeeping in Exotica International, her mother's ladies' clothing shop. The Economist likens her to another shopkeeper's daughter, Margaret Thatcher, writing that Nikki's girlhood job in her mother's shop gave her "an extreme watchfulness about overheads and a sharp aversion to government intrusion."