Sri Lankan by Birth, Tamil by Heritage, Canadian by Choice

Introduction

On this week’s episode, I’m going to be talking about a wide range of controversial issues with a guest who’s learned his life lessons the hard way—Tamil-Canadian business executive, philanthropist, author, community leader, and proud Canadian patriot Roy Ratnavel.

In his new book, Prisoner #1056: How I Survived War and Found Peace, Roy writes about his 1980s-era childhood in Sri Lanka, which was then in the midst of a long and bloody civil war that pitted the country’s Sinhalese majority against an insurgency led by the Tamil Tigers, which many countries classified as a terrorist group.

Roy himself was one of the many Tamil youth who were rounded up and imprisoned during this period. And he spent more than two months being brutalized in a government-run prison.

Tragically, Roy’s father would soon fall victim to government forces, though not before he found a way to get Roy out of prison, and out of the country.

This is how Roy, then still just a teenager, suddenly found himself living in Toronto in the late 1980s, working unskilled jobs while trying to learn English and understand the customs of Canadian society.

Fortunately, Roy proved to be a quick study, rising up from a mailroom job in a then-fledgling Bay Street financial firm to become a star of the sales force.

In time, Roy would rise to become vice-chairman of CI Global Asset Management, which was to grow into one of Canada’s largest investment management companies.

For two decades, Roy criss-crossed Canada, giving sales presentations to farmers and cattle-ranchers in small-town conference halls, where he often found himself the only non-white person in the room.

It all sounds like the improbable premise to some kind of fish-out-of-water Apple TV comedy series.

Yet Roy flourished in these lily-white environments. And he reports that during his entire professional career, he never once felt targeted by any serious form of racism.

Roy recently retired from CI, and now dedicates himself to philanthropy, community leadership, and travel—including to California, where his son is studying at an elite university.

He also has written opinion pieces for Canadian publications, which is how I originally got to know him.

Now, from what I’ve just described, you might think that Roy’s story is a simple rags-to-riches immigrant tale.

But Roy’s take on his new Canadian home is more complicated than that.

On one hand, Roy is profoundly grateful to Canada for taking in hundreds of thousands of Tamils fleeing the ravages of Sri Lanka’s civil war.

On the other hand, he’s also become unsettled by his adopted country’s economic and ideological direction.

In particular, Roy worries that many immigrants who followed his path remain mired in ethnic enclaves, and aren’t being encouraged to integrate into the wider Canadian society.

This includes some members of Roy’s own Tamil-Canadian diaspora. Despite the extraordinary economic gains made by Tamil Canadians in recent years, he worries, many still remain fixated on the geopolitics of their birth country—even more than a decade and a half following the defeat of the Tamil Tigers and the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war.

More generally, Roy’s become concerned by the political parochialism he observes among fellow Canadians.

Some conservatives, he notes, seem to be channelling a rising spirit of anti-immigrant nativism—with South Asians, who’ve recently been implicated in a series of high-profile criminal and immigration scandals, often being singled out for special abuse.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, Roy reports, many Canadian progressives would prefer to complain about Donald Trump than imagine ways to improve their own country.

Please enjoy my interview with Roy Ratnavel, accidental Sri Lankan by birth, proud Tamil by heritage, and patriotic Canadian by choice.