MONTREAL: Kamala Harris spent her youth in Montreal and often longed for her Californian hometown, but former Canadian classmates remember the American presidential candidate as an outgoing student with a big smile who loved dancing.

It was 1976, at the age of twelve, when the Vice President and Democratic candidate in that year’s US presidential election discovered the harsh, cold winters of Canada’s second largest city.

Her divorced mother took her and her sister Maya away from their Californian hometown of Oakland to take a job as a cancer researcher at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal.

“The thought of leaving sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, and moving to a French-speaking, foreign city covered in twelve feet of snow was, to say the least, unsettling,” Harris said in her 2019 memoir.

Harris is the first woman, first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president of the United States. She has said little about her years in Canada, and her biography on the White House website doesn’t even mention them.

Although she did not speak French when she arrived in Montreal, her mother insisted on sending her to a French-speaking school. After struggling to learn French, she transferred to a bilingual school with arts and music programs and then to Westmount High School, an English-speaking public high school, where she graduated in 1981.

A diverse public school

Harris was “very friendly, very outgoing. Nice to everyone,” said her former classmate Anu Chopra Sharma, describing her friend as a smart student who took the time to help others.

“We all had a lot of trouble with French because we were not native French speakers,” she commented. The majority of the province’s inhabitants speak French, but tensions between English and French speakers reached their peak in the 1970s and 1980s, when a nationalist identity tied to the language of Molière emerged in Quebec – marked by two failed referendums on Quebec independence.

Westmount High School, located in an affluent, English-speaking part of Montreal, accepted students from surrounding neighborhoods, so “many of the kids were working class,” says former art teacher Mara Rudzitis.

Published in Dawn, August 18, 2024