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

It was in 1976 at the age of 12 that the vice president and Democratic candidate in this year’s US presidential race discovered the harsh, cold winters of Canada’s second largest city.

Her divorced mother uprooted her and her sister Maya from their California hometown of Oakland to take a job researching cancer at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.

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

The first woman, first African-American and first Asian-American to become vice president of the United States, Harris has said little about her years in Canada and her biography on the White House website does not even mention them.

Although she didn’t speak French when she arrived in Montreal, her mother insisted on enrolling her in a French-language school. After struggling to pick up French, she transferred to a bilingual school with artistic and musical programmes and then to Westmount High School, an English-language public high school, where she graduated in 1981.

A diverse public school

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

“We all had a tough time with French, because we weren’t native French speakers,” she commented. French is spoken by the majority in the province, but in the 1970s and 1980s tensions between English and French speakers peaked as a Quebec nationalist identity tied to the language of Moliere took shape — marked by two failed referendums on Quebec independence.

Westmount High School, located in a wealthy and English-speaking borough of Montreal, accepted students from nearby neighborhoods and so “a lot of the kids were working class,” said former art teacher Mara Rudzitis.

Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2024