Canada owes America an apology – for Kamala Harris

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When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, many assumed her Left-wing ideology would immediately take centre stage. Lo and behold, that’s what happened.

Harris is a progressive’s progressive. She’s pro-affirmative action and supports gun control. She is weak on illegal immigration, has defended sanctuary cities, and was one of ten senators who opposed the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement in part because it didn’t tackle climate change.

It’s tempting to blame Harris’s politics on her upbringing. Her parents met at University of California’s Berkeley campus in the 1960s, at the time a hotbed of radical activism. Her father, Donald J Harris, a retired Stanford University economics professor, was described by The Economist as a “combative Marxist economist” whose writings are “sprinkled with obscurantist theorising.”

Yet, there’s another part to this story. My country, Canada, may have to apologise for its unfortunate contribution to Harris’s progressive thinking.

Harris lived in Montreal, Quebec between 1976 and 1982 while she was a teenager. Her late mother, Shyamala, took a research position at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital and taught at McGill University. Harris attended FACE (Fine Arts Core Elementary) School before graduating from Westmount High School. She also went to Vanier College.

“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,” Harris wrote in her memoir, The Truths We Hold. She braved the cold and survived in the land of igloos, back bacon and ice hockey. It may have helped transform her way of thinking, too.

Anu Chopra Sharma, a former classmate of Harris, recalled in an August 12, 2020 CTV News interview that her daughter had asked her, “How Canadian is she?” Sharma replied, “There’s no way I could have told you that she was American.” Sharma described Harris as “very liberal-minded, and that was one of the things that I liked about her … I personally think universal health care is going to be her baby … She got to see the other side of the coin, growing up.”

Nicholas Boston, who also attended Harris’ school, wrote in the Independent that she “found her voice early”. Here’s an example. A May 8, 2019 piece in the San Jose Mercury News noted that Harris and her younger sister, Maya, successfully organised a demonstration at their apartment building. They protested a policy that banned young children from playing (association) football on the building’s front lawn.

The demonstration “had nothing to do with language or race,” according to Boston. Fair enough. What it did show was that Harris had an inclination to be a political disruptor early. The football battle of her youth turned into a struggle for illegal immigrants and extreme environmental policies in adulthood.

Harris rarely discusses her years in Canada. She “recalled fondly” her time in the country during a 2021 phone call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Yet, she’s seemingly kept in touch with an aunt and uncle who live here.

Her aunt, Chinni Subash, told CBC News on January 17, 2021 that, while politics wasn’t top of mind during conversations with her young niece, this gradually changed. “As Kamala got more involved in politics, she showed a keen interest in understanding how things worked for us,” Subash said. “Like our health care system … how Canada was managing the Syrian refugee crisis and stuff like that. She was very interested in understanding how things were done here.”

Well, then. If Harris is elected president and incorporates elements of Trudeau’s policies into her own Left-wing agenda, more apologies may be in order.

Michael Taube, a columnist for National Post, Troy Media and Loonie Politics, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper

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