Global businessman wanted Mississauga to be on world stage
Iraq-born entrepreneur boosted his adopted home
Baghdad-born Gabriel Khayatt never set foot in Canada until his 60s, but he became one of Mississauga’s great civic boosters, a driving force behind the city’s strategy to attract international businesses.
“He did a lot to encourage us to go global,” Mayor Hazel McCallion says of Khayatt, a globetrotting businessman and former chairman of the Mississauga Board of Trade, who died Sept. 6 at the age of 88.
“He was determined to help develop the city economically.”
Despite his late entry to the country, in 1986, Khayatt quickly built a reputation here. He was a member of then-prime-minister Jean Chretien’s Team Canada trade mission to China in 1994, and led a trade delegation from Mississauga to Iraq in1997.
Canada was the final stop on Khayatt’s three-decade-long search for a country that would welcome him with open arms. After leaving Iraq in 1956, he lived in Lebanon, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and the United States before moving to Canada with his first wife, Juliette, who died in 2001.
“They so loved Canada,” says Khayatt’s eldest daughter, Viviane Decker, who lives in Atlanta. “They felt safe. They felt wanted.”
Khayatt would “wax rhapsodic” about Canada’s values of inclusiveness and peacefulness, says his Toronto granddaughter, Suzanne Heft, and he was happy about not having to move again.
Gabriel Anwar Khayatt was born in 1925 to a Christian family who owned a huge date farm that exported its produce to California.
When Khayatt was 16, his father died of a heart attack at a poker table in Baghdad. His father’s gambling had bankrupted the family, says Decker, and Khayatt had to quit school to support his mother and three brothers.
When he married two years later, he continued that support by giving half his income to his mother and siblings.
Khayatt’s life was one of ups and downs. “He made several fortunes and lost several fortunes,” says Decker.
In Iraq, he was the sole importer and distributor of Camel, Winston and Kent cigarettes. When he left the country, he had to give it all up.
In Dubai, he imported building materials from the United Kingdom as the emirate was going through an oil-fuelled building boom. When he moved from Dubai to Dallas, he had to start again.
“As I reflect on his life,” says Heft, “the ability to survive and start over is one of the defining characteristics of his persona.” Khayatt spoke fluent English, French, Arabic and Farsi.
The key to his success was his ability to get to know the right people at the right time by moving around in business, political and social circles. One prime example in the family’s photo album is a May 1971 formal dinner invitation addressed to Khayatt from “His Highness The Ruler of Bahrain.”
“The intersection of opportunity and necessity was really the perfect condition for someone like him, someone who was very comfortable navigating new terrain, exploring opportunity and creating opportunity . . . and he really thrived in that regard,” says Heft.
By the early 1980s, he grew tired of the Middle East’s political unrest and headed to North America. After two years in the United States, he moved to Toronto, and soon thereafter chose Mississauga as his home.
“He liked the openness of the large boulevards,” says Heft. “He loved the newness and the vitality of new buildings and new construction. To him, that signified progress. It was a place that suited him. He always wanted Mississauga to be a successful place, and he wanted to be a part of that.”
He had a great vision of Mississauga becoming the centre of global business.
“He had his goals and a determination to fulfil them,” says McCallion. “He was a very hard worker, very determined, very committed.”
Khayatt connected many companies in Mississauga with his business contacts in the Middle East. He also wrote very opinionated columns in the Mississauga Board of Trade’s newsletter, on topics ranging from world events to international business to Canadian politics.
Khayatt was also a fun grandfather to Heft and her two brothers.
“I remember going to restaurants where my parents would be present,” says Heft.
“He’d call the waitress over and, without their knowing, he’d order an enormous banana split or some chocolate milkshake or something that was completely unhealthy. It would arrive and our eyes would just bug open, and he would just smile. My mother would be completely livid with him, and of course she would never do anything about it because he was the grandfather. He was allowed to spoil us.”
Khayatt leaves his second wife, Shirley; two daughters, three grandchildren and two great grandchildren.