"On the Field, Not the Bench": Daniel Tisch Echevarría’s Case for Inclusive Prosperity

The scene that set everything in motion does not belong to him, but it lives in his family’s lore. In Madrid, a young Uruguayan architect, his professional credentials unrecognized, steps out of a client meeting and catches a flash of red and white next door—the Canadian flag over an embassy doorway. The work he was allowed to do in Spain did not match the work he was trained to do in Montevideo. He did not want his son to grow up under a military regime or serve in General Franco’s army. He walked into the embassy. That conversation led the family to Canada.

Daniel Tisch Echevarría was too young to remember the trip. What he remembers is the atmosphere at home: the way money made everyone tense, the watchfulness over every expense, the quiet precariousness of those first years. “My father applied to dozens of different possible employers and got two job offers,” he recalls—one from the Canadian government, the other from a small, upstart commercial architectural firm. His father chose the entrepreneurial path. Forty years later, the firm was the biggest in the country and he was its managing partner. “He experienced extraordinary success, but it didn’t start that way,” Tisch says. “It started with risk and precarity.”

Toronto in the early 1970s was not the metropolis it is today. Government policy may have opened doors, but the social climate could be hostile to anyone who did not look or sound like “everybody else.” “I remember people making fun of my mother’s accent,” he says. “I remember being made fun of at school… I remember feeling very different.” That experience did not turn him inward; it redirected his curiosity toward public life. If he was going to care about prosperity, it would have to be prosperity that included people “who have taken tremendous risks and shown remarkable resilience… and deserve a fair opportunity to participate.”

Identity, for him, is layered. He cheers for Canada. He cheers for Uruguay. He can even cheer for Spain. He visits Montevideo often to see a sprawling family on his mother’s side and recognizes the familiar cadences: how people greet one another, how they linger at the table, the questions they ask. But he is candid about how long it took to speak openly about his heritage. “I spent most of my youth trying desperately to fit in,” he says. The language to name what he felt—discrimination, intergenerational trauma—came later. His father had fled Eastern Europe as a small boy and escaped the Holocaust before making a life in Uruguay. “You inherit both the remarkable joys of your heritage as well as the pain… and they live in you,” Tisch says. “You’ve got to build the resilience to live with the pain, but also make yourself open-hearted enough to embrace the joy.”

That dual awareness—of pain and possibility—underpins how he thinks about the practical barriers new Canadians face. When asked which obstacles can be dismantled fastest, he does not hesitate: credential recognition, access to networks, access to capital. On credentials, he sees progress and friction at once. Provinces rightly set standards in the public interest; lives and safety depend on professionals meeting them. But that reality, he argues, is not inconsistent with urgency. “It is a profound tragedy when you have so much talent sitting on the bench and not on the field,” he says. The goal, in his view, is to get to evaluation based on skills and experience—“as much as a paper that’s on their CV”—and to expedite pathways for foreign-trained professionals so their expertise becomes part of Canada’s capacity, not a footnote to their sacrifice.

Networks are trickier because they are structural and cultural at the same time. Employers hiring “in their own image” will reproduce sameness by default. He notes a recent Ontario Chamber survey that asked businesses two simple questions—how important diversity is, and whether they have an actual strategy. The share listing diversity as a priority dipped slightly as companies focused on cash flow and costs, but the share with a concrete strategy rose by five percentage points year over year. The distinction matters, he argues, because strategy is what turns a belief into practice. In a world where some countries are “repelling international talent,” he sees a window for Canada—if its workplaces reflect its streets.

Tisch does not separate competitiveness and inclusion; he treats the latter as a source of the former. “Diversity is a number,” he says. “Inclusion is a culture.” Numbers tell you who is in the room. Culture determines whether people can “bring their whole selves to work,” raise a doubt in a meeting, and be heard. In his own firm, the lesson emerged in retrospect. Over more than two decades, he says, the company grew from 10 people to 175, from one office to 10, becoming the largest Canadian-owned communications consulting firm in its field. When they later joined an industry study, the data showed theirs was the most diverse workforce among the large firms in the sector. They had not set out to collect a statistic; they had valued difference and built a place where people wanted to stay and grow. “Now I’m beginning to understand why we’ve had such good work over the years,” he says—because better thinking comes from constructive disagreement and creative collaboration.

The path from principle to practice is granular. Asked for concrete advice to young Latino professionals, he starts with how to build a network from zero. Do not open with “I want a job”; ask for advice. “When you go looking for good advice, they’re more likely to give you a job,” he says. Treat each conversation as a chance to learn and to show how you think: look people up beforehand, read what they have written, arrive with questions that reflect real preparation. When you meet, ask who else you should talk to; the circle expands by multiplication—three contacts who each introduce three more. Follow up promptly. A basic thank-you sent on the way out of the building signals priority, discipline, and respect for someone’s time.

Inside a workplace, he values people who bring solutions with their problems, own their mistakes, and “try to say yes.” The last one comes with nuance. “Yes” can be “yes, but”—as in, help me prioritize among the three urgent things you have asked for, or help me plan for a foreseeable risk. The point is to show you are open to opportunity and simultaneously thinking ahead. As for errors: “Anybody worth working for is more interested in learning than blaming.” Expectation management is not weakness; it is a professional habit.

The role he imagines for Canada’s Latino community is similarly pragmatic and large. Geography and time zones matter; culture matters more. He describes Latin America and Canada as natural partners in a region where Mexico has become a powerhouse in global supply chains and where many countries share Canada’s mix of natural resources, educated professionals, and entrepreneurial energy. “Trade doesn’t happen between countries,” he says. “Trade happens between businesses—and trade happens between people.” People create relationships; relationships create trust; trust enables collaboration; collaboration produces innovation and measurable impact. By that logic, every bicultural Canadian is potentially an economic bridge. The opportunity is not abstract: a more regionally integrated economy can be globally competitive if the people who animate it are connected and included.

Underneath the policy talk, the narrative returns to the first house in Toronto and its careful ledger. It returns to a boy who wanted only to fit in and to a man who found, in leading teams, that the best decisions rarely arrive in rooms where everyone nods at once. It returns to a family story that crosses three continents and carries both survival and success. His argument is not about virtue. It is about using all the capacity Canada already has—and making sure that talent is on the field, not on the bench.