She loved disco dancing to Michael Jackson and even formed an all-girl dance group. She was well-loved and known for her laugh and cheerful personality.
But as Kamala Harris ramps up her presidential campaign, voters are unlikely to hear much from her about how she spent her formative years in Canada, a DailyMail.com investigation has found.
Harris was devastated when her divorced mother told her they were moving from California to Montreal, and she felt homesick for her five-year stay in Montreal in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
There is no mention of her Canadian upbringing in Harris’s official White House biography. website And in his 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, he wrote just eight paragraphs about this period of his life.
Harris and her younger sister Maya, now 57, moved from Berkeley to Montreal in 1977, five years after their parents divorced, when their mother Shyamala took a teaching and research position at the McGill University-affiliated Jewish General Hospital.
“It was an exciting career move,” Harris wrote in her book. “However, it was not an exciting opportunity for me.”
Kamala Harris easily won the Democratic presidential nomination this week, but most voters are apparently unaware of her formative years in Canada
Kamala’s high school friend Hugh Kwok (right with the 2024 candidate’s arm around his shoulder in 1981) recalled that she had “something special” at school and said she “blended in with everyone.”
She shared: ‘The thought of moving from sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, to a foreign, French-speaking city covered in 12 feet of snow was nerve-wracking, to say the least.
‘My mother tried to make it seem like an adventure, taking us to buy our first down jackets and gloves, as if we were going to be explorers in the great northern winter. But I found it difficult to see it that way.’
Harris, who attended four schools in Canada’s second-largest city between the ages of 12 and 17, said moving nearly 3,000 miles away “was made worse when my mother told us she wanted us to learn the language, so she enrolled us in a local school for native French speakers.”
That school was the École Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a red-brick primary school a short distance from Shyamala’s hospital.
“It was a difficult transition, as the only French I knew was from my ballet classes,” Harris wrote in her memoir. “I used to joke that I felt like a duck, because at our new school I would spend my days saying ‘Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?’ (What? What? What?).”
But Harris wasn’t afraid to speak out. When her landlord banned children from playing soccer on the lawn, she and her sister organized a protest, and the policy was overturned.
Harris appears in his 1981 high school yearbook from Westmount High School in Montreal.
Harris put the moves she learned in her dance group Midnight Magic to good use while campaigning in Iowa in 2019.
Kamala is seen as a child in January 1970, alongside her younger sister Maya and mother Shyamala, outside their home in Berkeley, California, before the Harris family moved to Canada.
Kamala (front row, third right) in her Grade 11 photo at Westmount Secondary School.
As her White House campaign heats up, Harris is downplaying her time in Canada and making no mention of it in her official biography.
In the fall of 1977, Harris began seventh grade at the bilingual Fine Arts Core Education (FACE) school in downtown Montreal, which counts singer Rufus Wainwright and actor Jay Baruchel among its alumni.
He took drama classes and learned to play the violin, horn and timpani.
“I felt like a duck, because all day long I was like, ‘What? What? What?'” Haarri said of her time at the French-speaking École Notre-Dame-des-Neiges school.
Classmate Vicky Compton doesn’t have many memories of Harris at FACE. “I just remember her as a warm and energetic person,” she said. “Nothing more precise.”
During grades 9 through 11, Harris was a student at Westmount High School, located in an exclusive, predominantly English-speaking neighborhood.
“By the time I got to high school, I had already adapted to our new surroundings,” she recalls in her book. “I still missed home, my friends and my family, and I was always very happy to go back in the summer and on vacation… but I had already gotten used to most of it.”
At Westmount High, Harris joined the dance club, served on the yearbook committee and founded an all-female dance company, Midnight Magic, that performed at school and in the community. Her classmates remember how much she loved dancing to Michael Jackson hits and Diana Ross classics.
“She fit right in,” Dean Smith told the Daily Mail. “She fell in with the right crowd. Everyone accepted her easily.”
“She was always a good person. She was always a fun person.”
Smith, who was a grade above Harris, remembers seeing her dancing at school and hanging out in the hallways with other girls.
“She didn’t have any boyfriends. She was a total academic,” she said. “She and her sister came here to study.”
Kamala seen in the arms of her parents Shyamala and Donald as a baby.
The presidential candidate’s former colleagues remembered her as a “sweet, kind” and “very happy, very sociable” person.
Her best friend in high school, Wanda Kagan, told her CTV Montreal…how Kamala helped her during her junior year.
“I was in a very physically and sexually abusive situation and she took me in with her,” said Kagan, 60. She was abused by her stepfather.
‘We were really close in high school as best friends, so I felt comfortable enough to finally tell her what I was going through.
“Her immediate reaction was, ‘Then you’ll have to come live with us,’ without even asking her mom.
Kamala and Wanda ended up sharing a room in Harris’s home. “Her mother and sister hugged me,” Kagan said. “I’m still very grateful to her.”
Kagan also recalled how Harris made plans for girls who didn’t have prom dates to celebrate together. “That shows how far back she fought for equality,” Kagan said. Canadian television channel from Montreal.
Kamala’s best friend from high school, Wanda Kagan, told CTV Montreal how she helped her during her junior year. “I was in a situation of a lot of physical and sexual abuse and she took me to live with her,” said Kagan, 60.
Kamala and Wanda, pictured reunited when Kamala became vice president, ended up sharing a room in Harris’s home. “Her mother and sister embraced me,” Kagan said. “I’m still very grateful.”
“That shows me his true character.”
In the 1981 Westmount High School yearbook, Harris is shown resting his arm on Hugh Kwok’s shoulder. The Canadian Press In 2020, Harris was a popular student.
“There was something special about him, he blended in with everyone,” he recalled.
Kwok said The Toronto Star In 2018: “He was a sweet and kind person. Very cheerful, very sociable.”
In her senior yearbook, Harris thanked her mother, urged her sister to “stay cool” and mentioned that her favorite expression was “No, I’m just playing!”
After graduating from Westmount High, Harris enrolled at Vanier College.
Randee Rosenthal Glassman recalled that she quickly became friends with Harris.
“I remember her laugh,” Glassman told the Daily Mail. “She was pretty, but I don’t know if she was popular with the boys.”
In The Truths We Hold, Harris said of her time in Montreal: “What I hadn’t gotten used to was the feeling of homesickness. I felt a constant longing to go home.”