Kamala Harris is not just the child of two foreign-born parents with close connections to the ruling, governmental elite of their home nations; she also grew up in Montreal, Canada, where the Canadian press boasts that Harris spent her formative years becoming well-versed in left-wing political ideology, laying the groundwork for her political career in neighboring America.
In 1976, when Harris was 12 years old, her divorced mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, took a job in Montreal at the McGill University School of Medicine and the Jewish General Hospital and moved her children with her to the nation where Kamala would spend her teenage years. Harris’ time in Canada has been largely omitted from the biographical narrative being pushed as she runs for president, which paints her as an African-American woman from Oakland, California, as opposed to the half-Indian, half-Jamaican, internationally-raised daughter of two foreign-born university professors.
After the 1976 move, Harris would spend the next several years in Canada, graduating high school there in 1981 and going on to attend Montreal’s Vanier College for one year, before curiously transferring to historically black Howard University in Washington, DC.
A recent report [1] in The Toronto Star sheds light on Harris’ Canadian background and accuses her of “downplaying the formative years she spent in Montreal” because “she has an election to win” in the United States.
The same Toronto Star report credits Harris’ left-wing political views to her time in Montreal, saying that her Canadian childhood would “later evolve into positions on social discord, radical change, democratic reform, linguistic rights, [and] the power of the ballot box.”
The move came at a time of previously unprecedented left-wing influence over Canadian politics and as Pierre Trudeau, the Fidel Castro-loving father of Justin Trudeau, served as Canada’s Prime Minister. (Although it should be noted that Justin Trudeau is widely believed to truly be the son of Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator with whom Trudeau’s free-loving mother had a “risqué” relationship in the run-up to Justin’s birth.)
The Toronto Star even went as far as to say that if she’s installed as President of the United States, Kamala Harris could be expected to show some form of loyalty to Canada.
“We know whether or not she admits it: this woman who may soon occupy the Oval Office has a nice little sliver of Canada lodged deep in her soul,” the report concludes.
Kamala Harris’ time in Canada is one of several points in her background countering the traditional ideals of what constitutes an American, especially an American President.
As mentioned, Harris was born in 1964 to a pair of foreign national parents, Shyamala Gopalan Harris and Donald Jasper Harris.
On her mother’s side, Kamala boasts immediate links to India’s Brahmin ruling caste, and her uncle, Gopalan Balachandran, is one of that country’s top-ranking nuclear weapons experts. He’s worked closely with the Indian military.
Indian interest groups in the United States have become some of Harris’ staunchest political supporters, with the Indian-American Impact Fund campaigning on her behalf and using her Indian name, Kamala Devi Harris, to do so. The support of Harris extends far beyond Indians living in the United States, as, back on the subcontinent, Kamala Harris campaign billboards have become a common site.
On her father’s side, Harris is the descendent of a prominent mixed-race family and, despite her efforts to paint herself as a black liberation icon, she is descended from prominent slaveholders, according to her father’s own writings on the Harris family’s history.
In 2019, as Kamala Harris ran a brief campaign for president that failed to get off the ground, her father came out against what he called her “fraudulent” racial identity claims and slammed her for using the Harris family “name, reputation, and proud Jamaican identity…in the pursuit of identity politics.”
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” Donald Harris told the media.
Though her father is still alive and owns a home near the White House in Washington, DC, much like Kamala’s Canadian childhood and high-caste Indian ancestry, he’s been largely omitted from her campaign narrative and was not present at the DNC in Chicago.