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,” her former classmate Anu Chopra Sharma told AFP, describing her friend as a smart student who took the time to help others.

“We all had great difficulty with French because our native language was not French,” she noted.

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 Quebec nationalist identity tied to the language of Molière emerged – 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.

The student body was also ethnically diverse and came from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and China.

– “Always had something to say” –

Harris, now 59, was active and very sociable, was a member of various clubs and took part in a school fashion show.

As a young girl, born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, she joined the disco dance groups “Super Six” and “Midnight Magic,” according to a school yearbook.

Old photos show Harris and his fellow dancers in glittering costumes performing their spectacular movements.

“She was always smiling and laughing, just like you see her today. She got along with everyone,” said her friend Dean Smith.

Rudzitis remembers a “very smart” teenager with many friends who loved to study and spend lunch breaks in the art room.

She was eloquent and “always had something to say,” she added, and was pleased that her former student was aspiring to the presidency of the United States.

During her years in Canada, she also decided to pursue a career as a prosecutor, eventually working her way up to become District Attorney of California.

“When I was in high school, I had a best friend who I found out was being sexually harassed,” Harris said in a September 2020 campaign video. “A big reason I wanted to become a prosecutor was to protect people like her.”

Her friend Wanda Kagan had lived with Harris’ family for several months after she revealed that she had been abused by her stepfather.

Although Harris appears to have thoroughly enjoyed her time in Canada, she admitted in her memoir that she was “homesick” for the United States. “I constantly felt like I was back home,” she said.

After completing her studies in Canada, she returned to the United States, where she began attending Howard University in 1982, a historically black university in Washington, known as “Black Harvard.”

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