At York University’s Fall Convocation ceremony on the morning of Oct. 16, an honorary degree was presented to financial services executive Mark Beckles, vice-president of social impact and innovation at the Royal Bank of Canada.
After accepting his honorary degree, Beckles spoke to graduands about his move from Barbados to Canada with his wife 34 years ago. The young, ambitious couple chose to relocate to Canada – where Beckles had lived briefly as a child and where his wife had been born – because they believed in its promise as a place where their wildest dreams could be fulfilled and their fullest potential could be reached.
The adjustment to Canadian life, however, wasn’t quite as smooth as they had hoped.
Arriving in Ottawa with a job offer already in hand – or so he thought – from one of Canada’s big banks, Beckles quickly came to understand that the person who hired him remotely hadn’t realized he was Black.
“That was, for me, the first time in my career that I recall being consciously confronted with the ugliness of racism,” said Beckles, “and discovered that I possessed a certain naivety that I would need to quickly shed.”
The job offer was revoked, and Beckles was left, disheartened, to navigate an unfamiliar career landscape in a new country. Yet, he remained hopeful that better opportunities would come his way. And they did.
One week later, while waiting in a freezing-cold Ottawa bus shelter on their way to church, Beckles and his wife were offered a ride from a kind woman in a sky-blue Oldsmobile. One brief conversation later and she was introducing Beckles to a man who would help him gain the Canadian work experience he needed to land a job in his field – and would end up becoming a lifelong friend and mentor in the process.
“They did not judge me on the color of my skin or the thickness of my accent,” Beckles said of the generous strangers who came into his life that day and helped set him on a path to success that has continued since.
“I've had an inexplicably phenomenal career in Canada,” he continued. “Despite the dark inclinations of some people, opportunity has come my way through hard work – yes – but also with the support and allyship of people, most of whom look nothing like me.”
It is for those reasons and many others that Beckles continues to believe in the promise of Canada and its people, and its potential to become the just and inclusive society he imagined when he arrived here all those years ago.
“Canadians remain, for me, the brightest of lights,” he said, “and I know that my Canadian journey is not unique, and that many of you within an earshot of my speech can relate to my experiences … You can see yourself in part of my story – someone saying no to you, followed by others, plural, who say yes to you.”
His message to graduands was clear: to remain optimistic about the future despite the setbacks and challenges that are sure to come their way, just as they did for him.
“Sometimes, in a world that surrenders to its own darkest impulses, you too must be among the brightest of lights,” he said, “Regardless of faith, identity, culture or tongue, we are all huddled and masked in this intersectional moment on lands upon which we are mostly all settlers just trying to belong, and that requires of us a new courage and a new commitment to a shared prosperity.”