Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event on California’s Proposition 50 on Nov. 1, 2025, in Los Angeles.Ethan Swope/The Associated Press
On Sunday afternoon, former U.S. vice-president Kamala Harris told a packed crowd in Toronto to stop saying “sorry” so much. Someone in the audience immediately chirped back, “We’re Canadian!” and laughter rippled through the auditorium.
For the third or fourth time that afternoon, we got to hear Harris’s infectious guffaw, unscripted and light. In a lot of ways, we saw a Harris almost entirely different from the one who campaigned for the American presidency last year – a more relaxed, less frantic version of the former vice-president, who in 2024 was forced to slap together a presidential campaign in just over three months.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Sunday’s talk at Meridian Hall, a promotional event for Harris’s recent memoir 107 Days, was the extent to which Harris’s answers diverged from her book. Celebrity book tours have a habit of parroting whatever content’s on sale at the gift shop, but that didn’t happen here – many of the insights were new. “This is not a campaign event,” Harris said with a laugh, after catching herself listing her accomplishments rather than answering a question directly.
Here are four revelations from Harris’s Toronto tour stop that expanded on the themes of 107 Days – as well as a few brand new take-aways.
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Gen Z will shape the future of politics – and the way we talk about it online
Harris spent much of Sunday’s talk discussing the power of young adults in modern politics: “I love Gen Z,” she said. “I love this generation.”
“Gen Z are demographically a larger population than boomers,” she continued, rattling off stats. “They have only known the climate crisis. They lost critical phases of their education and socialization during the pandemic. It is estimated they will have, in their lifetime, 10 to 12 jobs, whereas older generations came out of college with that one job, where they then retired.”
According to Harris, the power of Gen Z rests mostly in the generation’s ability to decipher misinformation and disinformation. As technologies such as AI chatbots and social media continue to evolve, young people will continue to be a valuable asset as society wrestles with fake news, overseas political influence and increasingly lifelike deepfakes.
“Gen Z is not watching the evening news,” she said. “They’re getting a lot of their information on TikTok and Instagram. As we are thinking about the future of democracy, the future of society, one of the issues we have to confront and really think about is this issue of how we share accurate information.”
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Harris ‘cares deeply’ about the relationship between the United States and Canada
In the first 10 minutes of her talk, Harris made a point of referencing the hot-and-cold relationship between the U.S. and Canada since President Donald Trump took office in January.
“I have many Canadian friends,” she said, recounting her time as a high schooler in Montreal and shouting out her extended family in Mississauga. “I care deeply about this relationship between the United States and Canada.”
She revisited the topic toward the end of the event: “I am convinced the strength of the relationship between nations is completely and almost entirely dependent on the strength between the people of those nations,” she said. “Let’s have some faith in the fact that we still do have those relationships between people. That will carry us through these specific moments of conflict or crisis.”
Predictably, a few Trump jabs
When asked to contrast her campaign against Trump’s agenda, Harris took a swipe at the President’s leadership style: “There is some perversion coming from [Trump’s] camp that the measure of strength is based on who you beat down, instead of what we know to be the real measure of strength, which is who you lift up,” she said, calling Trump’s rhetoric towards disadvantaged communities “garbage.”
“I was raised with a sense of understanding that we each have a responsibility to serve, no matter your profession,” she continued.
In addition to her experience of losing the 2024 election – which she discusses at length in 107 Days – Harris recalled the feeling of winning a very different Trump election nearly a decade ago.
“I was elected to the United States Senate the same night that Trump was elected for the first time,” she said. “It was a very bittersweet personal experience because I thought we were going to have our first woman president that night. So I went to the Senate with a completely different agenda than I thought I had.”
While Harris experienced several career milestones while in the Senate – including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial Senate hearings – the time in office came with a number of personal sacrifices, including missing her stepdaughter Ella’s high school graduation, she said.
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Hope for the future – and the importance of investing in local communities
Throughout the event, Harris returned to the idea of optimism – even when such a thing can feel impossible as fascism rises around the world.
“There are moments of darkness,” she said. “But the fight, from my perspective, is born out of a belief in what is possible. It is born out of a sense of optimism about what we can do, and what can be.”
For Canadians looking to improve the world around them, Harris suggested that they should invest their time into local non-profits, which, in the U.S. and Canada, are often stretched similarly thin.
“Human behaviour has a lot to do with what people are hopeful about,” she said. “Figure out in their community where there are non-profits doing the work you care about. There are non-profits doing a range of good works that would love to hear from you, to figure out how you can contribute to what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s baking cookies, sometimes it’s doing whatever needs to be done, writing things, knocking on doors.”