Canada's minister of health is an unknown to most, but Liberals call her the 'godmother'

National Post

3 days ago

MONTREAL – Marjorie Michel never wanted to run for office. She didn't want to come out of the shadows, she said.
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To most Canadians, she's a complete unknown. In Montreal, though, she just replaced Justin Trudeau as the MP for Papineau. And in Ottawa, she was recently appointed as minister of health. Yet since the April 28 election, she has remained almost invisible, trying to acclimate to a life she knows well, but never imagined for herself.
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Behind the scenes, Michel is praised for being 'direct,' serious, organized, calm, pragmatic and 'blunt.' And in Montreal's Haitian community and in Quebec's Liberal circles, she's known as a heavyweight, and called a 'pioneer.' Several people spoken to for this story referred to her as the 'godmother' of the Liberal Party in Quebec.
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'When you are a staffer, you're there to advise, you're there to protect, but you're not there to make decisions, either. So, you often have to live with advice you've given that isn't taken,' she tells National Post, in French.
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But it's a life she grew up with. She's the daughter of a former prime minister of Haiti: Smarck Michel held the post for a year from 1994 to 1995, appointed by the country's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide when Aristide returned to power after being deposed by a coup d'état.
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Marjorie Michel had worked in Haitian politics, too. But the political instability and the country's inability to embrace a peaceful democracy became too much. In even their upscale Port-au-Prince neighbourhood, kidnappings were common.
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'It was a very tense situation because there were kidnappings of people we knew,' said Marjorie Michel's daughter, Maxim Kernisant. 'So, it was very, very anxiety-provoking. And I know that my sister was also having panic attacks; she didn't want to go to school anymore. It had really become unbearable.'
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One morning, in 1999, Marjorie Michel told her two daughters they wouldn't be going to school. That's when she decided to leave Haiti.
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They settled in Montreal in 2000. She lived alone with her two daughters in a tiny apartment in the Outremont neighbourhood, with a limited salary, and a teenager attending a French private school in the city. Money was tight, but education and security were Michel's priorities for her family.