Finance minister’s daughter carves own path
“I’m not bad at math . . . but it’s not my specialty, either.”
That was 17-year-old Clare Morneau — fresh as an Aveeno Girl, sporting a pair of Converse sneaks — defending her honour in the add-and-subtract department. Being the formidable daughter of Canada’s finance minister, I couldn’t help but inquire about her mathematics prowess when I recently sat down with her.
What is her specialty, it would appear, is advocating for the less fortunate. At a point when many teenagers are swamped with the arduous task of taking selfies, here’s one Havergal student who just launched her first book, Kakuma Girls. Telling the first-person stories of African girls inside a refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, it’s the byproduct of a larger pen-pal initiative that Morneau was inspired to start between her school and the all-girls school that her dad’s company spearheaded inside the camp.
Call her Craig Kielburger in a kilt. Or maybe just call her the newly named UN Global Youth Ambassador for refugee issues (the youth counterpart, sort of, to the role that Angelina Jolie holds). Bright, poised and fluent in the issues she cares about, she comes across in person as neither a Serena nor a Blair in the lingua franca of Gossip Girl.
“It’s the craziest time of year,” Morneau said, striking the tenor of any normal 12th-grader. “Everybody is freaking out about university applications.”
Asked about her own wish list, she said she was interested in various classic liberal-arts schools in the U.S. or possibly one particular school geared toward the foreign service.
Her interest in global affairs and in philanthropy in general? Born “at the kitchen table,” she allows, growing up in a household with Bill Morneau as dad and Nancy McCain (yes, those McCains) as mom.
It’s a family of six: she, her two brothers, Henry and Edward, and an
“Writing letters (to the Kakuma Girls) made it more personal . . . and real.” CLARE MORNEAU
adopted sister, Grace (who joined the family from Uganda and has clearly also informed Clare’s interest in Africa).
“I like letters. I also like getting postcards,” she ventured when pressed about the somewhat-antiquated idea of pen-palling that formed the bedrock of her book. This, in a time when most young people won’t even answer their phones, let alone sit down with pen and paper.
Morneau — who got into the habit of writing letters when she spent a year in France — says, “Writing letters (to the Kakuma Girls) made it more personal . . . and real. You put more thought to it. And it has a little more permanence.”
Having said that: Yes, she does tinker around on Snapchat, too. And she’s in charge, she confirms, of curating her mom’s Instagram.
When the conversation sauntered over, at one point, to those zeitgeisthoggers that draw so many in her generation, Morneau shrugged and said, “I wish I’d seen as many stories about refugees in the last 24 hours as I’ve seen about Kim Kardashian’s stolen ring.” (Though she is pleased to see that there’s been top-of-theline coverage of refugees of late, especially in the context of the ongoing crisis in Syria.)
What did the teenager learn from campaigning for her dad, who represents the riding of Toronto Centre? Well, in many ways, it meshed well with her interests, in that it helped her get a better understanding of the diversity of the city and that riding in particular. Going door to door was an experience in more ways than one, though.
“There are a lot of naked people who come to the door!” she laughs.
If nothing else, the Trudeau rahrah-rah and experience with canvassing helped hone her powers of persuasion, ones that should come in handy when the do-gooder prepares to face an audience of thousands; she’s been tapped to speak at We Day in Ottawa on Nov. 9 and recently spoke at the One Young World conference (a kind of Davos for youth).
Morneau, who played field hockey for five years and is on the debate team, is also quick to credit her school for giving her the proper launch pad for life. The all-girls Havergal, one of the more storied schools in the city, is “so good at supporting . . . a diverse set of interests,” she says.
And as for that uniform she’s been wearing for years, she’s surprisingly cool with it. She’s so busy trying to save the world and all that, she actually likes not having to think about what she has to wear to school.
“I know exactly what I’m wearing,” Morneau said. “It just speeds everything up.”