Mélanie Joly

I. The Farm, the Referendum, and the Letter

Mélanie Joly was born on January 16, 1979, in Montreal, Quebec, into a family whose roots in Francophone Quebec stretch back thirteen generations to a farming community north of Laval. Her grandfather's generation was still working that land when the Pierre Trudeau Liberal government expropriated several hundred properties in the early 1970s to build Mirabel Airport. The farm was gone. Her father chose accounting instead. He met her mother — a teacher — at university, and together they raised Mélanie and her two older brothers in the Ahuntsic neighbourhood on Montreal's north shore, encouraging all three children to learn English.

Politics arrived early. In 1995, Joly was sixteen, studying at a CEGEP, and unable to vote in the Quebec Referendum. She joined the student association instead and led her first strike — "because that's part of any Quebec student-union experience," she says with a chuckle. She campaigned with an all-woman team, not on the referendum's existential questions, but on the practical ones: the cafeteria, the schedule, the quality of the coffee.

After completing an Honours Bachelor of Law at the Université de Montréal in 2001 and joining the Barreau du Québec, she won the Chevening Scholarship — awarded by the British government to outstanding emerging global leaders — and fulfilled a lifelong dream: studying at Brasenose College, Oxford, where she earned a Magister Juris in European and Comparative Law.

She returned to Montreal and joined Stikeman Elliott, one of Canada's most prestigious law firms. In 2007, she published a letter in La Presse that would define her public life. Quebec was in the grip of a fierce debate about the accommodation of ethnic and religious minorities, with the loudest voices coming from older, white francophones who saw immigration as a threat to Quebec's secular, French identity. Joly, 28, was having none of it. "Since my childhood, I've lived in an inclusive Quebec," she wrote. "Immigration is not just a necessity, but an enrichment." The letter ran with a photograph of Joly crouching in an Old Montreal alleyway, surrounded by six friends. She was the only one smiling. She was very much the centre of attention. Both facts would prove to be constants.

II. Dead Last to Second Place: The Best Day She Didn't Win

By 2009, Joly had left law for public relations, becoming a managing partner at Cohn-Wolf in Montreal. She launched the Printemps du MAC fundraiser at the Museum of Contemporary Art and co-founded a magazine and think tank for Quebec's disaffected thirtysomethings — people who felt that the established political parties' youth wings were, as she wrote, "a nursery of privileged people 'destined' for political success." She was building a platform, a network, and a voice, though she would not have described it that way at the time.

In 2013, she did something that most political strategists would have called suicidal. She founded a new municipal party — Vrai changement pour Montréal — and ran for mayor of Montreal against Denis Coderre, a veteran Liberal MP with deep roots in the city's political establishment. She started dead last in the polls. She came second. On election night, still on a high, she told reporters: "This proves something — I matter."

It was, in retrospect, the best day she never won. The loss made her. Justin Trudeau, who had been watching, called. He wanted her to run federally for the Liberals in Ahuntsic-Cartierville. She said yes.

She also made a private decision around this time: she would buy one piece of art every year for the rest of her life. A ritual of marking time. Of staying connected to something beyond politics. Her first piece had been a gift in 2009 — a series of postcards featuring photographs of Lebanon by Montreal artist Martin Désilets. When she was finally elected as MP on October 19, 2015, she splurged. She bought three.

III. The Minister with the $1.3 Billion Budget and the Red Polka-Dot Pumps

On November 4, 2015 — sixteen days after her election — Mélanie Joly was appointed Minister of Canadian Heritage. She was 36. Her department had a $1.3-billion annual budget and a mandate to protect and promote the sometimes-proud, often-insecure national identity of a large, disparate nation. She oversaw the CRTC, Canadian content regulations, the country's 150th anniversary celebrations, and the question of how to regulate Netflix, YouTube, and the internet without strangling them.

Maclean's sent a reporter to watch her work. He described a woman who arrived at Toronto's YouTube creative space in black pumps with red polka dots, introduced herself to every student she encountered — "Hi, I'm Mélanie, the minister for Canadian Heritage" — and spent ninety minutes flitting between studios with "positive, near-radiant energy." He called her "the sunniest Liberal." It was not entirely a compliment. It was also not entirely wrong.

She moved through portfolios — Tourism, Official Languages, La Francophonie, Economic Development — accumulating experience and, more importantly, relationships. She was building the architecture of a political career designed to last.

IV. The Fourth Woman: Foreign Affairs in the Age of Crisis

On October 26, 2021, Mélanie Joly was appointed Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs — the fourth woman in Canadian history to hold the role. She sat down in the chair. Within three months, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. "Within three months of being appointed, we were in crisis management," she told Chatelaine in 2025. "But then crises just increased, so now the reality of any foreign minister in the world, particularly the Western world, is being in crisis management every single day."

The crises multiplied. The Nijjar murder and the rupture with India. The civil war in Sudan. The war in Gaza. The question of Palestinian statehood. Through it all, she articulated a doctrine she called "pragmatic diplomacy" — unveiled in an October 2023 address at the Economic Club of Canada. The idea was simple and hard to argue with: if Canada wants a voice, Canada needs relationships. During her tenure, Global Affairs Canada opened seven new embassies and re-established diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.

At the G7 and NATO tables, she noticed something that will surprise no one who has ever sat in a room where women are outnumbered. "When we present an idea, that idea is not necessarily heard until a male counterpart says it." Her response was characteristically practical: she and her female counterparts — Annalena Baerbock of Germany, Retno Marsudi of Indonesia, Naledi Pandor of South Africa, Yōko Kamikawa of Japan — formed a WhatsApp group. They text each other constantly. They repeat each other's ideas in meetings to make sure they land. "I say, 'That's a good idea, Annalena' or 'Yōko, you're absolutely right.'" It is, in miniature, a masterclass in coalition-building.

She was re-elected in 2025 with 61 per cent of the vote in Ahuntsic-Cartierville — the strongest result of her career. Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, she was appointed Minister of Industry. The portfolio has changed. The energy has not.

V. The Violin-Maker, the Cottage, and the Art

Her husband, Félix Marzell, is a violin-maker and entrepreneur. He was set up on a blind date with Joly by Soraya Martinez Ferrada — now Canada's federal tourism minister — who knew that if she told Marzell he was meeting a politician, he might not show up. She told him he was meeting an entrepreneur. He showed up. They married. He still, by all accounts, eschews politics entirely.

Their family vacations are spent at what Joly calls "a shack" — a Quebec cottage belonging to her husband's family. She nibbles Hazelnut Ritter Sport chocolate in her ministerial office. She buys one piece of art every year, without exception. The collection began with those Lebanese postcards in 2009 and has grown steadily ever since, one canvas, one photograph, one sculpture at a time — a private archive of the years she has lived.

It is, in its quiet way, the most revealing thing about her. In a career defined by public performance — the speeches, the press conferences, the WhatsApp groups with world leaders — the art collection is entirely her own. It does not need to be explained or defended or voted on. It simply accumulates, year by year, marking time in the way that only beautiful things can.

VI. The Best Days Ever

We asked ourselves, in the Just Gerald tradition, what Mélanie Joly's best days ever actually look like. Not the ones that make the front page. The ones that make the life.

Mélanie Joly has been called many things. The sunniest Liberal. A risk taker. A creative. A pragmatist. Someone who is "never hidden" about her ambitions. What strikes us at Just Gerald is something simpler: she is someone who has consistently chosen the harder road — the mayoral race she had no business winning, the foreign affairs portfolio she inherited on the eve of a war, the art collection she builds one year at a time, without fanfare — and who has done so with what Maclean's once called "ruthless optimism."

That is, in the end, what the best days ever are made of. Not luck. Not ease. The willingness to start dead last and come second. To buy three pieces of art when you win. To text your friends when the room is not listening. To go back to the shack every summer and remember what the water sounds like.

Best Days Ever, Mélanie. Best Days Ever.