APEGA
I was fortunate enough that the opportunity arose [to work with the Dali Lama]. How could I say no? If Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mahatma Gandhi were alive today, and you had the opportunity to work with them, what would you do? Why wouldn’t you see how you could work together and perhaps help create a better world?
Human rights have always been important to me. Everyone should be able to live with dignity, and Canada is a great country for that, where such opportunities exist. When I came to Canada, I did not have a citizenship with any country. It’s only after coming here that I’ve had that. It’s a duty then to ensure that you’re always participating and that we maintain this as a society where people can flourish and achieve. As the president of the Project Tibet Society, you’ve helped resettle 1,000 Tibetans in Canada. What should your fellow APEGA professionals know about that work? ND It really has everything to do with what I’ve said about giving people opportunity and the importance of immigration to who we are as a nation. Most of the immigrants this project resettled were born in India, and their parents had fled Tibet. They’ve never been able to achieve citizenship in India, although it must be said that India has been absolutely wonderful in the resources it’s provided. I can’t think of any other country that’s provided for refugees so well. Any resettlements to Canada I’ve been involved in, it’s always struck me how much these people’s lives change in a 24-hour period of air travel from Delhi to Canada. They’ve gone from being stateless to being on a path to belonging and having opportunity, in a really short time. It was important to me to make sure that no one relied on welfare within this project. Not because I have any problem with welfare, but it should be there for those who absolutely need it, and that’s the society we live in. So for a project like this, you want to do every- thing you can to make sure the newcomers don’t have to rely on welfare. And we succeeded. Not one of the resettled Tibetans ended up on welfare, which is remarkable, especially when you consider that about a third of them arrived here illiterate. Many of them have never had the opportunity to go to school, but that shouldn’t mean that their children do not have the opportunity. It was also important that we had zero tolerance for fraud or misrepresentation. We ended up stopping 30 some applicants who had already been accepted, because they had misrepresented themselves in certain areas. If we wanted to ensure that those we resettle
16 | PEG SUMMER 2018
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