I am Roy Ratnavel’s third meeting of the day when we meet for a coffee in downtown Toronto. And it’s not yet noon. And the man’s retired.
“I haven’t retired from life. I’ve retired from CI,” Ratnavel says, referring to CI Global Asset Management, one of Canada’s largest investment management companies. Ratnavel, 54, left CI in August after 34 years at the company, where he had a remarkable journey from mailroom clerk to vice chairman. Fit and fastidiously dressed, he could pass as a decade younger.
It’s a blustery, crisp morning in late November when I meet Ratnavel at Dineen Coffee on Bay Street. The coffee shop is located in the new part of Toronto’s financial district, south of Union Station. It’s a concentrated mass of glass towers that seems to have sprung up overnight.
Before I have the chance to take Ratnavel’s coffee order, he takes mine. Cappuccino for me, macchiato for himself.
I’ve asked Ratnavel to meet to discuss his remarkable life story and ‘outsider’s take’ on Canada, a country he’s called home for the last 35 years. Ratnavel has already recounted much of this story in his bestselling book, Prisoner #1056: How I Survived War and Found Peace. It’s a moving read that covers Ratnavel’s experience being imprisoned and tortured as a 17-year-old boy during Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil populations.
Ratnavel, who was imprisoned for the ‘wrong’ of being Tamil, ultimately had his freedom secured by a Sinhalese friend of the family. Thereafter, Ratnavel’s father made it his mission to get his son out of Sri Lanka.
Against the younger Ratnavel’s own wishes, he received a visa to come to Canada on compassionate grounds. He arrived in Toronto alone in 1988, an 18-year-old boy with little more than a new suit to his name. Just two days later, Ratnavel learned that his father was dead — shot by the Indian Army in his own home.
“As much as a part of me died, another part of me became a fighter,” Ratnavel tells me. “I thought that if I did well enough in life, somehow I could give the life he should have had.”
“That pain became the furnace for [my] ambition… I was really trying to show my father that I could do this and make him proud.”
For the only time during our interview, Ratnavel’s voice is tight with emotion.
“It also came at a cost. It came at the expense of friendship. It almost cost my marriage.”
After nearly ten years in Toronto, Ratnavel realized he needed to change what he describes as the “inputs.” At 27, he moved to Vancouver to “completely cut [myself] off from the world that I knew.”
“I started learning about others… How to appreciate people and how to win people over… I started taking self-responsibility for my actions.”
“Once I started doing that I started seeing my luck change.” People were more receptive to his thoughts. They started giving him opportunities. They wanted to do business with him.
These values — of taking responsibility and eschewing victimhood — are ones Ratnavel returns to repeatedly in our conversation and his book. He lists self-responsibility as one of the key values he learned from his father.
And he applies this message as much to groups as to individuals.
When I ask Ratnavel whether he thinks that former colonial powers like Britain have a role to play in rectifying the wrongs they left behind — in places like Sri Lanka or Israel-Palestine — his message doesn’t waver.
“I think sometimes it’s easy to blame the colonial masters and say it’s because of them. But I think you deserve a country based on the leaders you choose. Sri Lanka is a prime example of that.”
“[W]hen Sri Lanka got its independence in 1948, it was considered to be the nation that could be most successful, economically and democratically. But the leaders who came after that, based on their racial hatred for others… they turned it into a horrible place.”
If Ratnavel pauses for coffee — or breath — I don’t notice it. He has the capacity to speak in eloquent paragraphs, deep thoughts tumbling out with ease.
“Singapore got its independence in [1965],” he continues. “One of the poorest countries on the planet at the time… There’s a country that had a similar colonial footprint like Sri Lanka. But Lee Kuan Yew was an amazing leader. He was able to weld the three distinct communities into a harmonious polity…. they had a system based on meritocracy, not ethnicity.”
So people like to blame the politicians, Ratnavel concludes. But people elect the politicians.
“It took a leader with vision. You need to put people to work towards one common goal… And today Singapore is one of the richest nations.”
‘Nobody washes the rental car’
Ratnavel knows a thing or two about leadership. In 2020, the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business recognized him as a top Canadian executive — an honour Ratnavel says he initially thought he received in error.
What does he view as the key attributes of a good leader, I ask before sneaking in a sip of cappuccino.
“First, you need to show empathy to people,” he says, after a moment’s reflection.
“[This award] was given out during Covid. I realized how much the staff, especially single staff living in condo boxes downtown, were suffering,” he says. “You could see it in their eyes.” Ratnavel says he started holding one-on-one Zoom calls each week to ask how staff were really doing.
But now that the pandemic is over, Ratnavel believes business leaders need to get employees back into the office.
“It’s going to be interesting to do a case study one day, to see what kind of damage [the pandemic] did to corporate Canada. I don’t know what the answer to [remote work] is.”
“You don’t build a culture by Zoom calls.”
Perhaps because it’s midweek, you wouldn’t guess that companies are struggling to get employees back to the office. The coffee shop we’re in is buzzing, so much so that I occasionally have to ask him to repeat himself.
Ratnavel tells me he thinks companies also need to do a better job of fostering retention by giving employees a stake in their companies, whether they’re public or private.
“I owned a ton of shares in the company,” he cites as one reason why he stayed at CI for so long. “Nobody washes the rental car. I felt like an owner so I stayed.”
Yet, despite his own extraordinary journey, from victim to leader, Ratnavel believes leadership is largely innate.
“I think some people are just born to be leaders,” he says. “I think you can enhance your leadership skills. But I think some people just have it. I don’t think Winston Churchill went to leadership school to learn to lead the world. Mahatma Ghandi didn’t go to MBA school to learn leadership.”
Churchill… Gandhi… Does Ratnavel have political leadership in his future, I ask.
“[Politics is] a tough game. It’s a dirty game… I don’t see the world the way that people want me to see it. I would say to people what I actually think.”
“I’m not electable.”
I’m not so sure about that. The Conservative Party is surging in the polls. And Ratnavel’s values can only be described as classically conservative.
“The government’s job is to make sure your freedom is not infringed on,” Ratnavel says matter-of-factly. “And to ensure that as much as possible there’s a level playing field for you to have choices.”
“The rest of it comes down to individuals, households.”
“If you [are] a reasonable, thoughtful person, you raise reasonable, thoughtful people. As a father, I want to make sure that my son is a productive member of society… Once you do that, you have a happy household. Once you have a collection of those, [that] creates a community. And a collection [of communities] creates a great society.”
‘Poisonous chalice’
Ratnavel is most animated when he speaks about what it takes to make — and keep — a great country.
He describes the Canada he arrived in in the late ‘80s as that country.
Canada was a “prosperous liberal democracy, a colour-blind haven for immigrants and refugees. Its governing ethos… was one of individual meritocracy, regardless of superficial markers of identity,” he writes in his book.
Recently, though, “Canadians are repudiating what made this country so great.”
“We are living in a world where everybody is defined by their skin colours, their religion, their background. We’re going away from the tolerant society that Canada is known for [towards] superficial identities that separates us from who we are as people,” Ratnavel tells me.
In Ratnavel’s own experience, immigrants and people of colour don’t want to be defined by these aspects of their identity — and they don’t want to be treated as victims.
“Don’t tell your kids — if you’re a person of colour — that some nameless, faceless person is trying to keep you down. Because if you tell them that, [that] no matter what they do they can never get ahead in life, why would they even try? It’s a poisonous chalice.”
Ratnavel has been thoughtful about what messages he passes onto his son, he says. “Intergenerational trauma happened to [me] in Sri Lanka and I’m not going to pass it onto [him]. No, no, it stops here,” he says, punctuating the last word.
Ratnavel says he wrote Prisoner #1056 in part to give hope to the next generation of Tamils. But also because he wanted to “give homage to Canada and to really sound the alarm by saying we’re going down the path Sri Lanka went.”
“If people think that I’m being paranoid, I don’t think so. I see the same signs. Where people are pitted against each other. Rich versus poor, liberals versus conservatives, white versus people of colour. And these are troubling trends. We’re being put into buckets.”
“One of the reasons Sri Lanka went down the path it did is… everything got separated into ‘you’re Tamil, you’re Sinhalese, you’re a Hindu, you’re a Buddhist, you’re a Muslim’. You only saw them as that. You never saw them as people.”
“I don’t think that we’re far away from that in Canada or in the Western world. You can see it right now. People are openly calling for the death of certain groups or communities. And somehow it’s okay and people look the other way.”
With this deep passion for creating a better Canada, Ratnavel is unlikely to spend his retirement years playing golf or sitting on a beach.
Real purpose
The din in the café has lessened as the lunch hour nears. I ask him my final question: what does he plan to do next?
“I don’t want to sound too clichéd, but [after writing the book], I thought ‘what is my real purpose here?’ I thought there are maybe other things I can do… I want to leave some sort of an impact that is not just financial.”
Right now, that means serving as a board of director of the Aristotle Foundation, a new Calgary-based think tank. He mentors kids. While he has been relaxed and generous with his time during our conversation, he has three more meetings in the afternoon.
And he gives keynote speeches, “taking this message mainstream… that at the end of the day it’s individual responsibility.”
“It probably takes someone who never lived here for the younger part of his life… to put the mirror in front of us to say we must appreciate what we’ve built,” he says. “We should always work to make it better.”
