MONTREAL – Marjorie Michel never wanted to run for office. She didn’t want to come out of the shadows, she said.
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.
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.
Before 2025, Michel was deputy chief of staff and close adviser to former prime minister Justin Trudeau. Being a politician, the public face of the government, has required some adjustment.
“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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
After a year, two of Maxim’s cousins moved in with them. And Michel was left raising four children aged between five and 12 all by herself.
“She was truly the rock of the family. The person you could always count on, and whenever you needed guidance or information, she was the one,” said Kernisant.
Politics never left Michel. She dived into the provincial scene for several years with the Quebec Liberal party as an organizer and an advisor to MNA Emmanuel Dubourg, who was also born in Haiti. He would eventually move to Ottawa, where he was the Liberal MP for Bourassa from 2013 to 2025. Eventually the two of them ended up as a couple and got married.
Just like Dubourg, Michel found her way into the federal Liberal party. In 2019 she became chief of staff to then president of the Treasury Board Jean-Yves Duclos. She was made deputy chief of staff to Trudeau in 2021.
In 2024, Michel was briefly the federal Liberal party’s deputy campaign director, but soon left that role. Andrew Bevan, who was campaign director, describes her as a “confident and expressive” woman who makes sure you know she is in the room.
“She takes up space in that room, making clear that people know what her point of view is, and making clear what she thinks of the situation at hand,” he said.
When National Post first met Michel at a public event in June, she quickly admitted she wasn’t a very media-savvy politician. But she said her staff encourages her to make public appearances and to accept interview requests. It’s clearly not her favourite part of the job.
But she agreed to sit for one in her constituency office in Montreal, a beige office in a nondescript office building. The name on the door still reads “The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, MP Papineau”. There’s a wooden gate; evidently some kind of security barrier into the office.
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“I don’t know why we have that,” said Michel.
“We had a prime minister as an MP here before. Things are, I guess, different,” suggested one of her aides.
In her office, she shows off a note on Trudeau’s stationery, signed by the former prime minister. “Congratulations my dear friend! You have the best riding in the country,” reads the note in French. Trudeau left it after she won the riding with 53 per cent of the vote in April.
For years, Liberal insiders had urged Michel to run. She preferred to stay behind the scenes, finding candidates and organizing on the ground.
She believed in what Trudeau was doing. After the Liberal party began collapsing and lost a 2024 byelection in its long-held riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun (which she said she fully expected) she said she promised Trudeau she would fight to the end to preserve his legacy.
She offered to recruit candidates and, if necessary, run herself, anywhere, even in an unwinnable riding.
After Trudeau resigned and now Prime Minister Mark Carney was installed as Liberal leader, Trudeau summoned her to his office in downtown Ottawa, across from Parliament Hill.
“I want you to run in Papineau,” he said.
She said she told him that was out of the question. She did not want to be elected. Her husband had already decided to leave politics and she wanted to join him living in Montreal.
Trudeau told her to think about it. Then, Carney’s close advisers pushed her to do it. So she made the leap.
Carney would soon make her Canada’s first-ever Haitian-born cabinet minister.
“You have to be there when it’s difficult, and I think I’m strong enough to be there when it’s difficult,” she said. “Then there were the questions that I was a woman, and also that I was a racialized woman. At one point there were a lot of men who were running. So, I said to myself, well, if I accept, it’s going to be a seat for a woman,” she said.
Now her priority, she says, is to be a good MP for her constituents first, and to manage the Department of Health calmly — but firmly.
As minister, mental health was one of her top priorities, she said. Canadians are anxious, she explained, mostly because of the difficult relationship between Canada and the United States. She wants to help the prime minister weather the storm and “reduce the level of anxiety” in the country.
With the Liberals in a minority government, she doesn’t know how long she’ll be in the House of Commons.
“If we had won a majority, I would have run once and then prepared the next generation. Now, I don’t know. We’ll see,” she said.
National Post
atrepanier@postmedia.com
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