1970 saw a change of government in Sri Lanka that brought with it an attempt at wholesale social engineering. The coalition government led by Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the head of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), had a mix of Sinhala chauvinists, Trotskyists, Stalinists and an assortment of self-styled "progressives," all of them determined to change the face of the country beyond recognition.

The Minister responsible for the Land Reform Act of 1972 thought he was performing an act of genius because his legislation would kill several birds with one stone. It would deal with rural discontent and landlessness which, a year after the election had resulted in an abortive, though very violent, insurrection; destroy a land-owning class that was seen as supportive of the United National Party (UNP), the government’s main opposition; and reduce the influence of the Trotskyist Minister of Plantation Industries of whose intelligence and charisma he was more than a tad jealous.

In my case, as a known and enthusiastic supporter of the government that had just been defeated, I became a particular target because the government was in a legal position to remove my means of livelihood completely by taking away the land in excess of the ceiling of 50 acres available to me under the Land Reform Act and then acquiring the residue left to me for some specious "public purpose."

It didn’t take a genius to realize that both I and my young family had no future in Sri Lanka.

Fortunately, my spouse at the time had sisters who had settled and were well-established in Canada and it didn’t present too great a challenge to be accepted as immigrants into that country. All of this was done in as much secrecy as possible to avoid reprisals from a government determined to wreak vengeance on its opponents.

Canada, in the early 1970s, didn’t present too much of a cultural shock to a family that had grown up in an essentially European culture in Sri Lanka. However, my wife and I were mature adults without any experience of life outside Sri Lanka and our pre-teen daughter had received her education up to that point in the Sinhala language. Our son was only 13 months old and to all intents and purposes proceeded to grow up Canadian.

There were the inevitable adjustments that we had to make. For my wife, it meant no domestic help and the need to work at a semi-skilled industrial job. For my daughter, a pre-teen at the time, it meant going from instruction in the Sinhala language to English being the medium of learning. This did take significant adaptation even though English was the language of communication in our home. What loss of "status" we might have suffered, going from the so-called "landed gentry" in Sri Lanka to starting at the bottom of the employment and social ladder in Canada, was compensated for by the enormous political and personal freedom that our new home offered and the fact that we were not at risk of harm of any kind. For all of us, it meant moving from a large ancestral abode to a two-bedroom apartment in Don Mills, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto.

After beginning my working life in Canada at British Petroleum (Canada) in Toronto, as an accounts clerk, I was fortunate in my efforts to move back into the agricultural field, when a Sri Lankan friend who had preceded us to Canada, arranged for me to be interviewed in the province of Alberta, 2000 miles away, for a position at a livestock feed mill. I wasn’t successful in my initial quest, but was offered a position as a commodity buyer which included buying grain for what was then Canada’s largest (beef cattle) feedlot, with a capacity of 25,000 head. Talk about being thrown in the deep end! And in the Canadian Prairie in the middle of winter, where -30 degree Celsius temperatures were not rare, a far cry from Sri Lanka where anything under 25 degrees Celsius was "cold."

After a couple of years negotiating a very steep learning curve, I moved farther west to another position in the same field in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. This was beautiful country with all kinds of outdoor recreational opportunities where one often encountered deer, black bear, antelope, elk, foxes and coyotes while in pursuit of pan-sized rainbow and cutthroat trout in the myriad mountain streams in which one was able to wet a line.

The four years there gave me the opportunity to indulge my penchant for involvement in community activities, including heading up a volunteer board in a unique program providing social services of a preventive nature. This gave me a taste of what was to prove my "calling" for the next quarter century in Canada – community development initiatives and political activism.

I secured employment in the northern part of the province in 1981 and, as I never tired of saying, we didn’t suffer from culture shock until then. One of the tired jokes we used to tell was that running water in the northern native communities in winter was getting the bucket from a hole cut in the lake’s frozen surface to one’s cabin before it froze over! The lives that (white) southern ranchers and farmers lived was hugely different to that led by the aboriginal (First Nations and Metis) folk of the Lesser Slave Lake area in Northern Alberta.

The "school buses" in many of these isolated communities of between 200 and 400 people were horse-drawn wagons, with pot-bellied stoves providing heat in winter when temperatures could drop to minus forty degrees Celsius. The unemployment figure of around 90% would be indicative of the social realities that prevailed in these small communities in Northern Canada.

The scenery in this part of the world was often not the greatest, being largely muskeg (swamp) with scraggly evergreens. On the other hand, the lakes around which the settlements had been established were pretty and contained an abundance of fish, permitting of commercial fishing inclusive of netting fish under the ice in winter. The latter exotic process was something to behold and a detailed description of that procedure is, unfortunately, not possible in an article such as this.

As for the aboriginal people in these communities, after some initial resistance driven by suspicion that I was yet another fly-by-night with a briefcase and polished Oxfords, I established good rapport with those whose ancestors had inhabited this cold and often inhospitable part of the country for thousands of years.

I was fortunate to receive from those who were familiar with the culture of northern native people the mentoring that helped me develop sensitivity to the predicament of those with whom I worked while avoiding the trap of romanticizing their circumstances, a trap that too many "do-gooders" have ended up falling into, particularly when they came from "outside."

I look back with a great deal of nostalgia to the times I often spent chatting with a colleague in an adjacent sleeping bag on the floor of a classroom in some little school in a native community to which we both provided services, or discussing community needs with (aboriginal) members of these small communities using the services of an English/Cree translator when such was required. And covering distances that a small-island person would never have dreamt of – the territory to which I provided services was only marginally smaller than Sri Lanka and had a population of about 12,000 people (against Sri Lanka’s 20 million). A lot of real estate and very few warm bodies!

I then returned to the town in southern Alberta which I’d left six years earlier and took on the Executive Director’s position in a program similar to the one I’d just headed up. This was for a brief two years.

Next stop: a "camp" in Central Alberta catering to the recreation needs of the physically and mentally disabled, though "camp," given an indoor swimming pool, state-of–the-art equipment etc. would be a significant understatement insofar as a designation was concerned. This was challenging work though my initial fear of working with a population with special needs and of which I had no previous experience I found to be groundless.

After about a year, I moved into employment which was different again: helping set up a multiple-service business on an Indian Reserve. This consisted of an auto repair shop, a convenience store, a small restaurant and a gas bar. My wife who had extensive experience in the hospitality industry had responsibility for setting up the restaurant while I worked, often under very frustrating circumstances given the politics of Indian Reserves, trying to establish the other elements. Here I confronted "Indian politics" at their worst, confrontational and vicious. I was constantly in the crossfire between the rival factions on the board of the company with authority over the operation, each of which sought to control matters irrespective of the business consequences.

When that contract ended, I began employment in the City of Edmonton, Alberta’s provincial capital, the first time in eighteen years that I was operating in an urban setting.