Californian Harris also claims roots in Montreal

Leonard Cohen is no longer the most famous graduate of Montreal’s Westmount High School. Kamala Harris, the U.S. senator from California named on Tuesday as Joe Biden’s running mate for the Democratic presidential ticket, spent a good portion of her early life in Montreal, and graduated from Westmount High in 1981.

The move to Montreal from California was precipitated when her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer specialist, landed research work at the Jewish General Hospital and a teaching job at Mcgill University.

Harris, 55, makes history as the first Black woman and Asian-american on a major presidential ticket.

Her own presidential bid had ended in December. After a strong start, Harris’ campaign quickly foundered amid strategic somersaults.

First positioning herself as a progressive in the mould of reformers such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Harris then tried to tack toward the centre. Her position on health care, for example, became a mishmash.

“She was trying to play the middle a little bit and trying to be all things to all people,” said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

But in the months since, she emerged as a fierce advocate for police reform and social justice — in the Senate, in the streets, and on the airwaves, sparring with Republicans on the Senate floor and offering fiery critiques of President Donald Trump.

Now, Payne said, “There is a little more of a defined voice. There’s more clarity to her public persona.”

Her background in law enforcement — she had served as a prosecutor and California state attorney general — had been seen as a vulnerability early in the race for the party’s nomination.

But her work of late has impressed some past doubters who say she did not do enough to investigate police shootings and too often sided with prosecutors in wrongful conviction cases in the past.

Harris’s entry in the 1981 Westmount High yearbook has little to suggest Harris would reach such lofty heights in U.S. politics.

She seemed more preoccupied with a return to California and “dancing with Super Six,” although she gave props to her mom and advice to her sis: “Be cool, MAYA!”

The family had moved to Montreal when Kamala Harris was 12; in her memoir she seemed ambivalent at best about moving north.

“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.

“My mother tried to make it sound like an adventure, taking us to buy our first down jackets and mittens, as though we were going to be explorers of the great northern winter. But it was hard for me to see it that way.”