A fighter for immigration, inclusion and diversity: Ratna Omidvar

Good profile and interview:

Another crucial field that needs far more analysis, she said, is the immigrant path to entrepreneurship – a route that many take when they find it hard to break into the corporate world.

“It is fascinating how certain communities have begun to put their stamp on certain sectors,” she said. “The Koreans in the corner-store industry, the Somalians with the dollar stores, and you can’t take a limo to the airport without coming up against someone who is from Brampton who originally came from the Punjab.” What needs particular study, she adds, is “the pathway, and what we can do to support the immigrant entrepreneur.”

One diversity initiative that is already well advanced is the effort to get more immigrants and visible minorities on boards of directors. The DiverseCity onBoard program – which Ms. Omidvar helped launch at Maytree and is now housed at GDX – has helped place more than 700 people from underrepresented communities on the boards of public agencies, charities and non-profits in Toronto. It has now expanded to Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Ont., Calgary and Vancouver. In the long run this will produce a “pipeline” of experienced individuals, Ms. Omidvar said, some of whom will end up on corporate boards where minorities are still highly underrepresented.

Ms. Omidvar has managed to recruit many top business leaders to her vision. Dominic D’Alessandro, former chief executive of Manulife Financial Corp., worked with Ms. Omidvar to promote mentoring programs for immigrants at the insurance company and other large corporations. “She made converts of everybody,” Mr. D’Alessandro said. “I can’t think of anybody we called on who wasn’t responsive to the vision that she was setting out, about a more inclusive community.”

Still, many barriers to immigrant integration remain, Ms. Omidvar acknowledges, and she is acutely aware of the backlash and bad feeling that sometimes bubble to the surface in Canada. When she wrote a commentary in The Globe and Mail in 2013, suggesting that the citizenship oath of allegiance to the Queen should be replaced with an oath to “Canada, its laws and its institutions,” a slew of ugly online comments appeared. Many of these said essentially: Go home if you don’t like it here.

To see these kind of views expressed – even in the dodgy underworld of online commentary – was disheartening for Ms. Omidvar, whose accolades include the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario.

She also finds it unfortunate that the Conservative government is using issues such as the wearing of the niqab in citizenship ceremonies as a means to divide Canadians. “That has been picked on by the Prime Minister as a wedge issue that speaks to their base, and divides other bases,” she said.

Still, Ms. Omidvar is confident that, in time, it will be easier for immigrants to become integrated in Canadian society and for established Canadians to accept newcomers with open arms. She is heartened by the views expressed by her daughters – one of whom is a lawyer and the other a market researcher – that diversity is now a given. “What is wonderful about their lives is that they are so used to everyone being different, and they just accept it as the norm.”

And over all, she said, most Canadians see the value in welcoming newcomers. “One of the wonderful things is that most Canadians understand that we need immigration,” she said. “We will argue about who the immigrant is, and how they should come … and whether they cover their hair. But we don’t, as a country, argue about the fact that we need immigration. And we don’t have any political party that is explicitly against more immigration. That is very unusual.”

Essentially, she said, “we are creating a new world here.”

A fighter for immigration, inclusion and diversity – The Globe and Mail.