Law, Politics, Poetry & Econometrics

 

Atif Kubursi

 

In 1972, Atif Kubursi formed Econometric Research Limited which he has continuously served as its president. In 1982, he joined the United Nations Industrial Organization as Senior Development Officer. Since then he worked as a team leader of several UNIDO missions to Indonesia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan and Egypt. In his consulting activities he has specialized in the areas of economic development strategies, impact analysis and regional planning with special emphasis on the environment, tourism and industrial development. He has frequently lectured on globalization issues, economic development, oil and industrialization, impact of tourism on provincial and local economies, political economy of development, Arab affairs and on environment-economy linkages. Atif is presently a Professor of Economics at McMaster University. He designed computer based models for national, provincial and regional economies, directed a large number of projects for ERL and the United Nations in Canada and abroad. Author of seven books in economics and over 200 articles and reports; he speaks Arabic, French, English and some German.

 

Professor Atif Kubursi was born in Lebanon, during the Second World War. He was the only member of the family born in a village, because people escaped the cities to the comfort of the countryside. That was a defining moment because, as he puts it, a person forms an attachment to the mountain and the people of the mountain; the agricultural background, which makes a serious imprint on the development and perspective of things.

 

Atif was a member of a family of five children. He was right in the middle stuck between a boy and a girl. His father was a lawyer and a politician, his mother was a lawyer also. His father made a big name for himself but Atif thinks it was his mother who was smarter. His mother did not practice law but had her hands on every case his father received. His parents felt he had to be a lawyer first, and then he could be anything he wanted; because he says that there is a principle that states: “ignorance of the law is no excuse”. His childhood was in many respects a very memorable one. Lebanon was, and still is, a very beautiful place to be, he lived in a very cosmopolitan area in Beirut, near the American University. His house was always full of poets, which he really enjoyed. Every Thursday some of the biggest and most renowned names like Nizar Kabbani, Adonis, Yousef Alkhal, Khalil Hafez, Fouad Rifka, Khalil Hawi would be at his home. It was a very literary house. He remembers he could not get a penny from his dad to go to the movies but his dad would give him a Lira if he said he wanted to buy a book – no questions asked, so they always bought books. As a child Gibran khalil Gibran was his most favourite author. He was 17 when he taught a course on Gibran to people who were taking the second part of the Baccalaureate; he was one year ahead of them and in the summer the professor got sick and he had to go and fill in for him. It was the most enjoyable thing for him to perform the actual work of the teacher. But that time, he was also a kid and he liked to read children stories.

 

His father was a very politically oriented person. They rarely saw him because he was heavily involved in politics. He was either running away or in prison, because at that political participation or involvement was a risky business. He remembers one time coming home – he was only 12 and they had gone to see his dad in the prison called “Habs El Ramel”, he had to rent a small bike and went with his brother, almost got killed several times just to see their dad. These incidents left imprints and woke him up many times in the middle of the night, the army coming to search for his dad, and rumors that his dad was so small that he was a rat under one of the carpets and they would open all the carpets and leave them in every place thinking that his dad was hiding under one of them. But in one sense he could not believe it. He looks at his kids (his teenage kids) and cannot help but thinks that when he was a teenager, he was an organizer; organizing political rallies in support of Algerian struggle against French occupation in 1950s. He was literally at that time 13 years of age and heavily involved in, and conscious of, the world around him. Young people of his generation took their responsibilities very seriously. He ran a double life childhood where he was a little kid on the street playing football in the school with his friends, being mischievous, and at the same time he had a political cause since early child.

 

When Atif left Lebanon to study abroad, none of his family members thought that he would leave and never go back to Lebanon. He remembers the last parting words of his mother were: “you are going on two legs, you come back on two legs," by which she meant "do not bring home a foreign wife." He remembers the tears when he was leaving, when he was 19 years old. He first went to the United States of America as a graduate student. At the age of 19 he had a Master degree already. And he also had a law degree. All his classmates in the States were 24/25 but he was 19. He had to teach a course on the first week he got there, and still remembers how excited he was and then the shock came when he looked around the faces of the students and there was not a student who wasn’t older than him. And then they told him: “sit down high school kid, the professor is going to be upset”. Then he had to tell them that he was the professor. In the United States, he had to repeat his Master before being allowed to go for his Ph.D. His mom came to visit his sister in Ottawa during that time and within 6 weeks his mom passed away. His sister was alone and was devastated, so he decided to come to Canada. He got interviews at three universities in Canada: Carlton, Western and McMaster, and was given a couple of offers from Carlton and McMaster, so he tried to go to Carlton but McMaster kept up after him until he relented and decided to join McMaster University.

 

When he first came to Canada, it was February in 1969. The push from the U.S. was that he could have been a draftee to the Vietnam War and he was not prepared to participate in the war. He was also really struck by how organized Canada was compared to the U.S. He was really happy with the welcome he had from the professors who came all the way from Hamilton to Royal York to pick him up. On the road, he found them to be incredibly sophisticated. His wife was American so he had a lot of support; with an Arab wife things would have been totally different, she wouldn’t have fit with the wives of the other professors. The university back then was relatively small and a very tightly knit group, where professors would go to lunches each day together and go out on weekends. He thinks the first 10 years at McMaster were the golden years; they were an incredibly open group, tightly knit, quite friendly and very supportive. So he was really a part of the founding elite because every year after that they were hiring 5 or 6 professors. They grew from about 14 professors to 35 in about 4 years, and all the newcomers slowly but gradually chipped at the social system. It became too big to manage; they could not do things all together. The university broke down into small cliques and the economic profession was also polarized. Things were really growing in the seventies, shifting the paradigms from social liberal economics into neoliberal ideology which is really conservative economics. They had a lot of British people coming and unfortunately, without generalizing or engaging in stereotyping, the British tend to be socially very close minded and great intellectuals, but almost innately and epidemically racists in many respects. Their racism was mainly directed against the Indians and Arabs.

 

Atif strongly believes that there are some really great advantages to Canada. You have got the sophistication and most advanced system without having to suffer the insufferable American narrow mindedness and colonial mentality. So McMaster University was initially such a convenient place for him. He happened to have a chairman who was an incredible open-minded guy, which defies his theory about the British because he was an Englishman. He loved debates and so did Atif, and because of that mutual interest, they managed to do lots of things together. They did shows in their debates where 2000 people would come from the whole town. The Chairman spoke perfect English and the first time he was really dismissive, so Atif told him: “since you have eloquence and speak better English, and since I know more about the science of economics than you do, probably eloquence would not be a good match for substance.” And the Chairman said: “this show is hard to follow, but this logic is much harder to follow”.

 

Atif thinks he was really lucky. In the year 1970, there was a colleague of his working as a consultant with the Ontario Government and then got involved with the Ministry of Finance and decided to leave the university to work at Queen’s Park for the Ontario civil service. He asked Atif whether he would be interested in a consulting job with the Ontario government. At that time, it was a very big ministry whose name was Treasury, Economics, and Inter-Governmental Affairs (TEIGA), and had a very tough minister who was a real power house. Atif came in the morning for the interview and as a result he ended up staying over there for years as an economic consultant for the Ministry. Once again, scientific substance proved to be more enduring and beneficial than linguistic eloquence.

 

Among the many enlightening stories Atif narrated was the one related to the time he spent at Cambridge University (England) as a visiting professor for two years. His luck came when the minister of health from Iraq came for a visit to Cambridge and the University administration arranged an “Arab breakfast” for him, to which Atif was invited. Atif arrived late to the event and ended up setting next to the Iraqi minister who started chatting with him and eventually they agreed to meet for lunch. During their luncheon meeting, the minister told Atif of his intention to enact a law, titled called the “Return of the Brains Act” and the minister asked Atif if he would like to offer his assistance by going back to work in Iraq and they decided to give the professor an Iraqi salary like any other Iraqi professor plus compensation equivalent to the difference between the local salary and that paid by American universities. At that time, Antoine Zahlan , an Arab Lebanese scientist who was focusing his research on the “Arab Brain Drain,” had established a data bank of all the Arab graduates who went from the Arab world to study in Europe and the United States but did not return to their countries of origin after graduation. The Iraqi authorities thought very seriously about encouraging, indeed seducing, those Arab graduates and scientists to return to Iraq. As a result of that mere chance encounter with the Iraqi minister, Atif ended up spending one year in Iraq as an economic consultant for the Iraqi Ministry of Planning. It was a most rewarding and exciting experience.

 

He wasn’t a unique kid born into a politically charged family, but the logic in the country at the time was that he had many friends whose parents didn’t like them to be involved in politics... He would be pointed out as “this dangerous guy; stay away from him,” fearing he would get their children involved in the messy and risky game of politics. He had lots of parents who told him not to come around and play with their kids. At one time, he remembers, he went to his dad and told him that all his friends had bikes or toy cars how come he didn’t have any. His father’s answer was “you have something more important, you have a cause.” Atif answered: “but it doesn’t have four wheels”. And he was always worried that his dad would get assassinated. The flip side of it, which he missed, was the deep sense of solidarity and commitment to social justice. Even at the university when someone would get into a fight or if someone says something against you or threaten to harm you, you would invariably find some 50 people around you ready, and willing, to stand by you.

 

Atif remembers the time when he used to love riding motorcycles and his parents’ objection because of the dangers involved. He used to take the tram in order to rent a motorcycle, but the minute he got back home his parents would argue with him because someone would have seen him riding on the motorcycle and would hurry to tell his parents. Among other things, this goes to show the deeply-rooted respect for parents’ opinions and concerns in Arab societies in general. Lamentably, in Canada children are encouraged to do what they want without consulting parents. In this respect, one of the major objectives of our collective Canadian Arab efforts is to re-weave some of the social networks that we lost from the old country by reconnecting the community, not necessarily through dictatorial or coercive up-bringing methods, but through the use of positive means that encourage and enforce mutual help, creating social functions, youth getting together, organizing trips, camps, and other social and cooperative activities for Canadian Arab youth. The rich and vibrant Canadian society can provide Arab youth with limitless opportunities for collaborative and enriching collective activities. In this respect, life for the young in Canada can be second to none. The challenges may be great, but so are the rewards.