Bob Ramsay is a “proud extrovert and a natural enthusiast.” A former advertising copywriter, book editor and speechwriter, and the current head of Ramsay Inc., a Toronto-based communications and marketing firm, Ramsay thrives on connecting with people and sharing ideas. As a champion of community, Ramsay has helped steer Canadian institutions, sitting on the boards of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Women’s College Hospital Foundation and others. For more than 40 years, his RamsayTalks series has offered a platform for influential leaders and thinkers. Here, the recipient of the Governor General’s Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Bernier Medal discusses the importance of connection.

On becoming a writer

It was a teacher who turned me on to writing. I can point to a final exam where I thought, “I’m just going to write the way I want to write.” My schoolteacher got back to me the next week and said, “Boy, that was a great final exam you wrote. You can really write.” To have a figure like that say I could really write when I was 17 years of age meant the world to me. I just carried on from there, and I took English literature when I went to university. My father, like lots of parents, told me, “Do what you love.” So that’s what I ended up doing. 

On the RamsayTalks speaker series

I had the best job you could ever have out of university: I was a speechwriter for Ontario Premier Bill Davis. But the job wasn’t what I thought it was. I had no contact with people and ideas, and ideas and people are my oxygen. One day I had this radical concept: why don’t I invite somebody in to speak to us? Since then, I’ve hosted hundreds of speakers over the last 45 to 50 years. I can still remember the first speaker in 1972 was Grant Farrow, a kidney doctor at Toronto General Hospital. His opening words were, “Seat belt legislation is putting me out of business because nobody’s dying on the highways anymore, and I’ve lost my access to kidneys.” And we all were taken aback and went, ‘what did this guy just say?’ I thought that was an extraordinary thing to say, and I became hooked on doing these events. I love connecting people. To be able to stand up at Koerner Hall [in Toronto] and introduce a speaker makes me pretty happy. 

On being called a connector

It’s funny because people have called me a connector all my life. For the first 30 years, I would cringe when somebody said that because what I heard was, “He’s only a door opener.” My view of that changed completely as I got older. And there is proof that people who have strong connections — wide and deep connections — live longer, are less prone to disease, less prone to depression, etcetera. So now I wear that label with great pride