The woman of the hour in the United States, during this week of the Democratic convention, is very reticent about her adolescence, which she spent in Montreal, from 1976 to 1981.
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The candidate for the presidency of the United States almost never talks about it and analyst Luc Lavoie has difficulty understanding why.
“It’s never mentioned. It seems like they’re afraid of what Obama went through when businessman Donald Trump decided to pursue him to see if he wasn’t born on American soil (…) I wonder why they’re hiding Montreal. It’s funny, because those are pivotal years in his life,” he exclaimed on LCN.
“His mother was a professor and researcher at McGill. That doesn’t sound very ‘middle class,'” suggested his colleague Emmanuelle Latraverse.
Host Paul Larocque therefore asked the question to the civil law attorney in the United States and author of a biography on Kamala Harris, Me Olivier Piton.
He listed three reasons that seem to push Mme Harris kept his Montreal years quiet.
First of all, it is a question of nationalism, he claims.
“As long as it’s not happening in the United States, it’s necessarily less important. Whether it’s Canadians or Europeans, we always experience a little bit of that,” explains Mr. Piton.
The latter underlines, secondly, that the current American vice-president, ultimately, lived for a short time in Quebec and, above all, that it was a very long time ago.
Finally, on a personal level, Kamala Harris might not have very fond memories of this part of her life.
“This move from California to Montreal disoriented her a little bit. She didn’t live those years in an optimal way (…) and she was happy when her mother brought her and Maya, her sister, back to California,” says the lawyer and author.
To see the full interview, watch the video above.
