Baljit Singh Chadha,
Canada's Nut King Entrepreneur : continue
BY PETER C. NEWMAN
But Chadha also holds a vital public position that
is at the very heart of Canadian democracy. He is
one of the five members of the Ottawa-based Security
Intelligence Review Committee, which provides an external
(and presumably unbiased) review of the operations
of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. To
work in that touchy arena means he is privy to whatever
secrets our secret service has uncovered. That requires
top security clearance, which in turn demands a drum-tight
oath of allegiance. Thus he is entitled to the title
"Honourable," and to the initials P.C. after
his name, denoting that he is a member of the Queen's
Privy Council of Canada, and has taken the same oath
as ministers of the Crown.
Established in 1867, Canada's Confederation year,
to advise the Crown (that is, the government), this
august and seldom publicly mentioned body packs the
kind of silent clout that speaks the loudest in Ottawa's
corridors of power. All federal cabinet members belong
to the Privy Council for life, as do chief justices
and other distinguished individuals. In Chadha's case,
his membership denotes the trust placed in him by
the man who sponsored him in 2003 -- then prime minister
Jean Chrétien. (The other current members of
the CSIS review committee are former premiers Gary
Filmon of Manitoba and Roy Romanow of Saskatchewan,
former Alberta Reform MP Raymond Speaker, and New
Brunswick lawyer and businesswoman Aldéa Landry.)
It was a ballsy appointment to have Chadha, a practising
Sikh complete with turban and bushy beard (though
one who refers to himself as "very liberal"
in his thoughts and beliefs), sitting in judgment
of CSIS. Apart from the dilemma of stereotyping, this
could be a potentially tricky situation at a time
that same agency proved to be astonishingly incompetent
when it wiped telephone surveillance tapes that would
have been crucial evidence at the recent Air India
mistrial. Chadha won't comment on that issue.
He is not a barrel of laughs. Always serious and
unfailingly polite, he spent a couple of hours with
me discussing his feelings about Canada. Unlike many
other members of this third-wave group of newcomers,
he doesn't let his passionate admiration of his new
homeland stop him from criticizing it. During our
conversation, he suggested some interesting ways of
improving our national potential. His thoughts are
worth considering because they reflect not merely
his concerns but the profound worries of most of the
newcomers, who generally still feel too insecure or
too shy to express them.
At the end of this dry recital, I ask him how Canada
fit into his story, and why he decided to stay here.
"My personal philosophy," he replies, "is
that the most important decisions in your life, you
really don't make yourself. They are presented to
you, and you just follow their path. I just happened
to be here, and this is going back to when there were
no faxes, and I had to depend on telexes, telegrams
and even trunk calls -- overseas calls you had to
book ahead. But it worked, and in hindsight, I think
it was one of the best decisions in my life to stay
in Canada, and to stay in Montreal. India was then
a controlled economy, and in the mid-1970s, when they
started to open up the economy, there were certain
opportunities that presented themselves. I could start
doing business out of California to India, and was
the first to do so."
Then came the essential turning point in his career,
his proof that opportunities appear out of nowhere
and that you must not only believe in this magical
notion, but also depend on it and, above all, take
advantage of it. This is Chadha's story of that defining
event in his career:
"I used to deal with a Canadian bank -- I won't
name it -- and as a student had a $20,000 line of
credit. It was a lot of money, and the thing was that
I dealt with an assistant bank manager, and that was
his limit, the maximum that he could give. I used
to present him with cash flows and business plans
-- 30 years ago, even big corporations didn't do that
-- and he had total confidence in me. And then what
happened, I started a business in California and he
got transferred. So I started dealing with the bank
manager, and I said 'Look, I'm starting this business,
I'm going to start getting orders and letters of credit,
et cetera, for thousands of dollars,' and he said,
'no problem, when they come in, we'll look after you
and everything.' Finally, when all these orders and
letters of credit came in, he tells me they're not
worth the paper they're written on. 'You have orders
on hand to ship out of California, but what's a 25-year-old
person doing with such large amounts of orders and
businesses?'
"So that's what happened. And at the same time,
the supplier who was supposed to put the goods on
the boat calls up and says, 'I need the money in advance,
otherwise these goods are not going.' I was stuck
between a rock and a hard place. It was make it or
break it, and you had no choice. I think the initial
orders were for a shipment of $50,000, and the subsequent
orders were a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
To fly to California in those days, you had to go
through Toronto. I was reading a newspaper on the
plane while going there, and saw an ad from the Standard
Chartered Bank, a British bank that was opening a
Toronto office. And I said to myself, 'Gee, that rings
a bell. It's the bank I think my family used to be
with in India.' I called the bank, and it was a small
rep office, with only three people, and I talked to
the manager. This is when, as I say, the most important
decisions you don't make, they're presented to you.
"I said I'm looking for financing for shipments,
et cetera, and it's a problem, things like that. He
kept listening to me, and at the end, he says, 'Are
you by any chance related to . . . ' -- the name he
mentioned was that of my grandfather. I said, 'That's
my grandfather.' He said, 'Go ahead, do your business.
Tell us where you want me to send the money.' It was
US$50,000. Amazing. I had not even met the gentleman.
'When you come back, we will do the paperwork,' he
told me, and I was on the way to California."
Chadha stayed with that bank until it closed its
office 15 years later. He, though, chose to stay in
Canada. "I could have been anywhere. I could
have been in the Bahamas, and not paid any taxes or
anything," he tells me. "But I stayed in
Canada, specifically in Montreal, and it was the best
decision of my life." After a few years, he says,
he grew to love the city. (He and his wife, Roshi,
a governor of McGill University, now live in Westmount.
They have a son, Harkeet, and daughter, Gurveen, both
in their teens.)
At the same time, Chadha is rightly concerned about
how much still has to be done in Canada to achieve
fair representation of different communities in different
sectors, whether it's public service, government,
politics or corporate. He is exercised about the glass
ceiling or glass door that separates them. Chadha
looks back to the wave of Irish who arrived in Montreal
in the 1840s, fleeing famine. "They came from
the great hunger, and settled in Griffintown, where
they faced discrimination. Then a second wave came
from Europe, and they included a number of Jewish
immigrants, who also faced a lot of discrimination.
Then the third wave were the people who came in during
the 1970s and 1980s, predominately from Asia, and
they are going through the same thing. And it will
happen to the fourth wave. We're living in the 21st
century, we say we are educated -- why does it have
to happen with every wave? Why can't society, why
can't government, be prepared?"
Legislation won't change attitudes, Chadha adds,
but our society needs more open thinking. "For
example," he adds, "if you look at the federal
public service, only seven to eight per cent of the
people are visible minorities. In Toronto, more than
40 per cent of the population today are new Canadians.
Yet if you look at the government, right from city
council, the police and everywhere, there has yet
to be some sort of openness to it. A lot of people
say, 'We want this,' but nobody applies. People don't
apply because they feel it is a waste of time. This
is one of the things that really has to change in
order to make Canada a good place."
Chadha is equally concerned that immigrants in the
third wave, not being of European or Judeo-Christian
stock, tend to live in what people are calling ghettos.
"There are people who consider that the Malton-Brampton
area [on Toronto's outskirts] is an Indo-Canadian
ghetto," he complains. "If you go north
of Toronto, there are Italian 'neighbourhoods.' Same
thing with the Greek 'neighbourhoods.' In Côte
St-Luc in Montreal, it's Jewish. Probably because
there's expensive housing, or because it's people
of a certain stock, people don't call them ghettos."
Canadians have to open up the doors for the new communities,
Chadha says, while those communities adjust and integrate.
"The immigrants, when they come, are always drawn
together where their own kinds are," he adds.
"And there's nothing wrong with that. At some
point, they expand to get out of it." But while
that's been the case with European immigrants, the
new Canadians might take longer to integrate because
they are recognizably different. "This is something
all levels of Canadians have to work toward,"
says Chadha, "but there's no big focus on this
happening."
One characteristic of new communities gathering together
is that they end up getting involved in politics.
"That's very strong in the Indo-Canadian and
the Punjabi community," Chadha says. "Because
they're concentrated, they have the political power."
But he has a problem with politics based on race or
religion. "We cannot be talking about, 'I'm a
Muslim,' 'I'm a Sikh,' 'I'm a Jew,' or such,"
he says. "We have to be Canadians first, and
then the other things are secondary or third degree.
Multiculturalism up to now has been fantastic, it
has brought us to a very important level, but we now
have to take this to the next stage."
Chadha has put his finger on a fundamental issue
with the new wave of immigrants -- their difficulty
in blending in easily because they are visibly different.
He wants to create more of a sense of belonging, a
sense of welcome and, finally, a sense of acceptance.
The only way this will happen, he feels, is if established
Canadians, collectively and individually, lead by
example -- from governments to big corporations --
not because they're following some regulations or
quotas, but as a social responsibility. "The
question is," he says, "do we have to blast
our way in? That's fine, but you cannot close the
door. We're in the 21st century." There'll be
another wave behind this one, Chada notes, "and
we shouldn't do the same thing to them. So we have
to change this concept to being Canadians first and
anything else after."
Chadha's secondary concern is that too much of Canada's
trade, around 75 per cent, is with one country, the
United States. He points out that if Canada was a
business with one customer controlling that high a
proportion of its turnover, the banks would stop lending
it money. He strongly advocates much more diversification,
including some serious effort to boost trade with
India, which now accounts for much less than one per
cent of Canada's exports. "We are not using Canada
as a brand as much as we should be in gaining goodwill
in different countries," he contends. "We
have a lot of unexploited ground."
But he also notes that Canada, like other countries,
is starting to recognize that its relationships with
other nations are not necessarily based only on trade.
"For Canadian companies to be competitive,"
he says, "they have no choice but to invest overseas,
to have joint ventures overseas. Because if we don't
do it, other countries will, and we'll be completely
left out of the global scheme of things. It's a politically
sensitive topic because, according to a lot of people,
you're moving your jobs away. But if we don't stay
competitive, the companies won't exist, there'll be
nothing left."
Chadha says he sees signs of progress, and not just
at the federal level. "I just came back from
India," he tells me, "and they were saying
that Ontario is going to have a permanent representative
there. Alberta already has one and Quebec Premier
Jean Charest is going in February."
My interview with Baljit Singh Chadha was a treat.
As a former immigrant myself who became a Canadian
nationalist, I was delighted to find another newcomer
who has developed such fierce but not unqualified
feelings for his adopted home country. As he got up
to leave, he said, "This is our home, this is
my country; there's no two ways about it. You probably
won't find a more ardent fan of Canada than I am.
We have one of the best countries in the world. And
the only thing that causes me concern is that we've
got to make sure we leave a better country than we
came into." He was speaking for both of us.