A look at U.S. presidential candidates’ ties to Canada ahead of this week’s election

By Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press on November 3, 2024.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes in the view with United States Vice-President Kamala Harris from the balcony outside her office in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

MONTREAL – Among the millions glued to their TV sets Tuesday night watching U.S. election results will be a group of people in Montreal with a particular connection to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris – her high school classmates.

Long before she became an American vice-president and presidential candidate, Harris spent several years in Montreal and attended Westmount High School from 1978 to 1981.

While she doesn’t talk much about that time, one of her former classmates believes her high school years helped shaped who she would become.

Dean Smith, a schoolmate who was a year older, said he believes that Harris’s time at the school made her comfortable mingling with people from many different backgrounds.

At Westmount High, he recalled in an interview, there were “Jamaicans, kids from Barbados, from Saint Vincent, from India, from Pakistan … everybody’s in that school. So for her to be in the position she’s in right now, that’s easy for her.”

Smith remembers Harris as smart and popular, with a love of dancing and a bubbly personality he still sees in her today.

“How you see her right now is exactly how she is: smiling all the time, laughing …. She was always like that, exactly like that,” he said.

Harris moved to the city as a teen so her mother Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher, could work at the Lady Davis Institute of Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital. Harris enrolled at Westmount after an initial stint at a French-language school.

In her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” Harris recalls the transition to Canadian life as a difficult one.

“I was 12 years old, and 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 12 feet of snow was distressing, to say the least,” she wrote. While she adapted to life in Montreal, “I felt this constant sense of yearning to be back home,” she wrote.

However, there were also glimpses of the path she would follow. In the book, she recalled organizing a demonstration with her sister in front of the building in Montreal where they lived to protest the fact that children weren’t allowed to play soccer on the lawn. Their demands were met, she said.

In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination in August, she recalled another key experience from Montreal that shaped her trajectory. Her best friend, Wanda Kagan, confided in her that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather, and moved in with the Harris family as a result, Harris said.

“This is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor: to protect people like Wanda, because I believe everyone has a right to safety, to dignity and to justice,” she said.

While Harris’s biography on the White House website doesn’t mention her time in Montreal, she “recalled fondly” her years there in a 2021 call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, according to a summary of the conversation known as a readout.

More recently, as vice-president, Harris has had numerous meetings and conversations with Trudeau in which the two have reportedly discussed a range of issues including women’s entrepreneurship, the COVID-19 pandemic, gender equality, trade and workers rights, according to summaries provided by Trudeau’s office.

The two met in May in Philadelphia, where they discussed U.S.-Canada co-operation on “a range of bilateral, regional, and global issues,” including the situation in Haiti and Ukraine, the readouts state.

Former American president and Republican nominee Donald Trump appears to have fewer direct connections to Canada than Harris. He made only one brief visit to the country as president, for the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Que., in 2018.

That ended with Trump calling Trudeau “weak” and “dishonest” after the prime minister criticized the president’s tariff actions.

The relationship remained publicly rocky during negotiations for the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement – the replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement – although a deal was eventually reached.

Trump told internet streamer Adin Ross in an interview this summer that he “get(s) along very well” with Trudeau, before adding “but he seems to be going very progressive and the people of Canada are not liking it.”

More recently, Trump has suggested Canada could play a role in alleviating California’s water shortages, claiming there’s a “large faucet” that could be turned on to divert water that’s currently flowing into the Pacific to the southern state. Experts, however, told The Associated Press that no infrastructure currently exists to directly transport water from Canadian snowcaps to California.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 3, 2024.