After months of preparing for his visit, the Lower Mainland’s Pakistan community welcomed one of the world’s most renowned cricketer cum politicians at the newly renovated Pakistan House in Surrey Monday afternoon.

Imran Khan, who is known as one of the world’s finest allrounders, greeted a crowd of approximately 600, as he wrapped up a fundraising tour across North America. With several projects on the go, Khan is as busy as they come.

Gearing up for the possibility of elections in Pakistan, he has been on a mission to drum up support for his political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), which he hopes will be able to open offices throughout Pakistan.

"I don’t want a compromise," he said in a speech at a luncheon organized by the Pakistan-Canada Association of B.C. "I want justice."

Amid Pakistan’s political frenzy in early 2008, Khan boycotted the parliamentary elections on the grounds that it was impossible to have fair elections without an independent judiciary system. Under a state of emergency in 2007, President Pervez Musharraf sacked several chief justices as well as detaining hundreds of lawyers and political opponents, including Khan himself.

Khan, who led the Pakistani Cricket team as captain to his country’s first and only Word Cup victory in 1992, has turned to politics and humanitarian projects after a youth filled with with cricket and being linked to high-profile love affairs.

During his days as a cricketer, he was once romantically linked to Susannah Constantine, an award-winning English fashion guru, and was married for almost 10 years to the daughter of the late UK billionaire Sir James Goldsmith, Jemima. They now have two children, who live with their mother.

Lately, Khan has been tirelessly working on raising funds for Namal College in the Mianwali district, which he hopes will be Pakistan’s Oxford or Cambridge.

Against the backdrop of pristine lakes and jagged mountains, the college is Khan’s effort to combat one of Pakistan’s biggest social ills: The lack of education.

As the sixth most populous country in the world, Pakistan’s literacy rate for its 160 million people still hovers at around 50 per cent.

As well as raising funds for the college, Khan used his tour to speak about the Shaukat Khanam Memorial Cancer Hospital in Karachi. Named after Khan’s mother, who died from cancer in 1985, the hospital provides free, state-of-the-art cancer treatment for roughly 70 per cent of its patients.

Khan, a self-proclaimed eternal optimist, reminded the luncheon crowd that although Pakistan’s political situation is currently a mess, it is a country with "great potential because of the vibrancy of its people." After all, it is the same country that was proclaimed the "California of Asia" by Swedish Nobel Prize Laureate Gunnar Myrdal in 1965, he said.

"The solution is actually very straight forward," he added. "It is to reinstate the constitution and the legal judges of Pakistan that were removed by an illegal emergency of Musharraf."

And with that, Khan thanked his hosts and left the stage to a standing ovation.