An Indo-Canadian was elected mayor of Fernie while another person of Indian origin was re-elected as Williams Lake’s top city official as municipal election results were declared in Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia. A third Indo-Canadian was elected the Mission city’s youngest mayor without a contest a month earlier.
Incumbent mayors were defeated as the elections were held for 161 municipalities and 27 regional districts on Saturday across British Columbia, where South Asians account for 9.6% of the population, according to the 2021 census.
Harshan Ramadass, better known as Harsh, the Fernie mayor-elect, has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Bangalore University’s Visvesvaraya College of Engineering and an MBA from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. He arrived in Fernie in 2011 to work with a resource company, and his daughter was born there.
“I am deeply honoured to be your next mayor, and I look forward to working with our new council and the entire community to turn that vision into action,” MyEastKootenayNow quoted Ramadass as saying.
Ramadass, who served on the city council for four years before entering the mayoral fray, said that, having grown up with limited means in India, he knows what it means to stretch every dollar and plan for the long term. “That mindset never leaves you — and it’s exactly the discipline I bring to how I think about public money,” Ramadass, who has worked in mining, automotive, and manufacturing sectors in the US, India, and Canada since 2003, said on his campaign website.
Surinderpal Rathor, re-elected as the Williams Lake mayor, was first elected to the city council in 1993. He served seven consecutive terms totalling 21 years, before becoming the mayor in 2022. Rathor arrived in Williams Lake in 1974 after immigrating from India at the age of 21.
Jag Gill, another Indo-Canadian, became the youngest Mission mayor a month earlier by acclamation and without a contest on September 18. He was first elected to the city council in 2018, the youngest to do so. After two terms on the council, he sought the mayor’s office.
Gill did not expect to win the election without a contest. “I wanted an election. I wanted to keep knocking on doors, put my eight-year record and my vision in front of this community, answer the hard questions, and ask people for their vote,” he said in a letter to the community.