Background
Albanese was born in Taranto, Italy, in 1957. She settled in Canada in 1981 and has lived in York South-Weston ever since with her husband, artist Germinio Pio Politi, her two adult children, her grandson, and her mother.
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Laura Albanese
Edit ProfileCareer
She represents the riding of York South—Weston. Albanese worked as a news anchor for Italian language news programming on Omni Television working in Italian language programming. In her youth, she moved back and forth between Canada and Italy.
Albanese worked in broadcast journalism spanning over two decades, from 1984 to 2007.
She worked in Italian language programming at Organising Medical Networked Information television in a number of capacities. She was featured as Company-Anchor of Organising Medical Networked Information News: Italian Edition, a one-hour daily Italian language newscast.
She co-hosted Incontri with Vincenzo Somma. The show was an evening news show broadcast in the Italian language.
Other shows that she worked on included Omni News: Italian Edition, Italianissimo, Telecorriere News, and Girotondo.
Albanese was nominated as the Liberal candidate for the February 8, 2007 provincial by-election in the riding of York South—Weston. The by-election was triggered by the resignation of Joe Cordiano, who resigned his seat for personal reasons. The appointment of Albanese as the Liberal candidate was contested by David-Paul Sip, another potential candidate.
Sip said that his candidacy was ignored by the riding association who wanted someone who would appeal to the riding"s large Italian-speaking community.
Sip launched a lawsuit against the Liberal party but Albanese remained as the Liberal candidate. Albanese narrowly lost to Paul Ferreira of the New Democratic Party by 358 votes.
Ferreira advocated raising the minimum wage from $8 to $10 which was opposed by the Liberal party. Voters were also angered by legislators who had recently given themselves a 25% pay increase.
Eight months later she was in a rematch with Ferreira in the 2007 provincial election.
This time with a much larger voter turnout, she edged Ferreira by 469 votes. Albanese was appointed parliamentary assistant (Pennsylvania) to the Minister of Culture, Aileen Carroll. During her first term as Master in Public Policy, Albanese advocated for funding to build the Jane Street Hub, a $6 Million investment toward building a new school for Saint John the Evangelist, a major expansion at West Park Healthcare Centre, 11 full day kindergartens in the first year of the program, and introduced a Private Members Motion calling on the Province to embrace electrification and another calling on increased safety of residential neighbourhoods close to volatile fuels operations.
She also introduced a Private Members Bill to eliminate the deduction of Old Age Security from workers compensation benefits.
She was re-elected in the 2011 election. In her second term she was appointed Pennsylvania to the Minister of Labour and subsequently Pennsylvania to the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport.
In 2013, when Kathleen Wynne took over as Premier, Albanese was appointed as Parliamentary Assistant to the Premier and also made Deputy Government Whip. In the June 2014 election she met Ferreira for a fourth time, and defeated him by 3,572 votes.
As of July 2014, she is Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Finance and also serves as Government Caucus Chair.
Membership
She is a Liberal member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario who was elected in 2007.
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Born
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Nationality
Canada -
Political Party
The Liberal Party