COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR

Logan Kanapathi worked with volunteer supporters from a wealth of cultures to make a breakthrough by being the first Tamil immigrant to hold political office in Canada.

                Lessons to be learnt from Kanapathy Victory.

1)"I am proud to be a Tamil but more than anything else I am a Canadian."

2) "By relying on Armenian, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Turkish, English, Korean, Italian and Tamil-speaking volunteers — embodying the ward's diversity in his team — Kanapathi achieved what no other Tamil Canadian had ever done: get elected to public office."

3) "He did it not by falling into the trap of appealing, as some have, only to his own ethnic group — a seemingly attractive strategy in a growing city full of strong cultural blocs — but by reaching out to everyone."

4) "More than 6,000 doors later, Kanapathi was able to claim victory in Markham's Ward 7 last Monday."

Resume:"Two or three years, I was doing very unskilled jobs, very difficult manual jobs," he said. Sometimes he laboured all day within a warehouse, lifting 25- to 40-kilogram boxes.

But soon after he became a citizen, he began working as a salesman at the Hogan car dealership.

"People would say, Logan, is this your dad?"

"I said `I wish.'"

Soon afterward, Kanapathi began studying to become a financial planner, after which he went back to Sri Lanka to get married, to a woman who was a family physician and surgeon in the island nation.

When she arrived, Kanapathi recalls, it was an uphill struggle for her to re-establish herself.

"It was a nightmare," he said. "She started all over again."

Now his wife has an established medical practice in Markham.

***********************************************