David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

MONTREAL — It doesn’t look like a crucible of power.

It occupies a full block on Sainte-Catherine Street, not far from my barbershop, a sushi restaurant, a bagel store and two dry cleaners. Its entry looks grand — three sets of oak double doors — but otherwise, there’s nothing remarkable about the pale brick structure. It’s a high school like so many others, except for the fact that my mother was a graduate. So was the poet and balladeer Leonard Cohen. Also, hockey standout Art Ross, the first coach of the Boston Bruins and the eponym of the Art Ross Trophy, given each year to the NHL scoring champion.

And Kamala Harris, class of 1981.

Four decades ago, Westmount High School was the setting for her first attempt at organizing others, her first expression of leadership, her first personal intervention for compassion and justice. She doesn’t mention it much — you had to know the back story to identify its trace elements during her triumphal moments at the Democratic National Committee — but it was here that for the first time, Kamala Harris stood apart, stood out and stood up.

Like John Quincy Adams, who studied at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Bill Clinton, who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in England — the only presidents who studied abroad — Harris was shaped by her education beyond America’s borders. Here she learned another language. Here she matched her experience in divisively integrated schools in Berkeley, California, with experience in a multicultural Canadian high school. Here she showed the first signs of ambition and activism.

That impulse emerged in steps. She, her sister and some other children marched with picket signs in front of their apartment building during a momentary break in a brutal Montreal winter. They wanted to play soccer on the front lawn. The rules forbade it. But once the picket signs sprouted, the building manager relented.

“It wasn’t fair,” Dan Morain wrote in “Kamala’s Way,” published just days before she was sworn in as vice president in 2021, “and Kamala cared a lot about fairness.”

That was but a prelude. She noticed that something was troubling her best friend. Finally, Wanda Kagan, like Harris from a biracial family, spilled all: She was being abused physically and sexually by her father. Harris told her that she had to move in with her family — immediately. Years later, when Harris was Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate, she wrote a tweet saying that one of the reasons she wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like Kagan.

The daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, she wasn’t the only pupil with immigrant roots. She and Hugh Kwok, who now modifies and repairs high-end cars at his Wingho Auto dealership here, became friends. “We integrated well with fellow classmates,” he told me. “It was never an issue. There was a very nice sense of camaraderie back then. She was proud of the crowd. I supported her in dance, she supported me in tennis. She was very well-liked.”

Westmount High, in the center of an English-speaking enclave in Montreal, draws from the very wealthy — the Westmount Independent newspaper is full of ads for multimillion-dollar homes — and from striving newcomers from Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani and Chinese immigrant communities. It is about 60% white.

This part of Montreal always has had social pressures, with charity benefits and a cultural code leaning toward parties and balls. For decades, my mother remembered being at a fete where a young man approached a wallflower and asked her if she wanted to dance. The young lady said she did, prompting the rude stripling to say, “I hope someone asks you.” In that milieux, two generations later, the young Harris — as a member of the pep club and one of the “popular girls” — and other girls deliberately attended the senior dance without dates. They wanted to give cover to their classmates who hadn’t been invited to the event.

She and her sister, Maya, came to Montreal because their mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast-cancer researcher, won a position at the Lady Davis Institute at the Jewish General Hospital here. Divorced and with a doctorate in endocrinology and nutrition from Berkeley, she was a vital part of the hospital’s research team and became a mentor to Dr. Michael Pollak, now director of the Stroll Cancer Prevention Centre. “She was focused and determined in every way,” Dr. Richard Margolese, a Montreal breast-cancer research pioneer who worked with her, said in an interview. “She had to do everything right.”

The move was unsettling. “I was 12 years old, and 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,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”

Her mother threw her into French language school, aptly named Our Lady of the Snows. She bought her daughters a new wardrobe.

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

The adjustment was difficult. When she’d been on a walk on a winter’s day, there was a lot of California dreamin’.

You won’t hear much in the campaign about her Montreal years. The fact that Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic nominee, attended a Swiss boarding school and spoke French did him no good; he was pilloried for being a fey elitist. And with Barack Obama drawing Donald Trump’s false insistence that he was not born in the United States, and thus not eligible for the presidency, Harris has reason to play down her time in a foreign country.

But the nomination of Harris last month caused a stir in Montreal and across Canada — and, as Janice Kennedy wrote in The Toronto Star, “We Canadians will harbor no hurt feelings about the strategic amnesia surrounding her Montreal years,” adding, “But this 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. We just won’t tell anyone.” But I would.