Mélanie Joly’s Meteoric Rise
IN 2009, 30-YEAR-OLD Mélanie Joly’s art collection began with a gift from family friends: a series of postcards featuring photos of Lebanon that were taken by Montreal artist Martin Désilets in 2001.
Joly, then a managing partner at Montreal public-relations firm Cohn-Wolf, had long been an avowed art lover. That same year, she launched the Printemps du MAC fundraiser at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. The volunteer gig fed Joly’s passion for art. But she found her true ambition in politics. Around the same time, she co-launched a magazine/think tank/advocacy group for Quebec’s disaffected thirtysomethings. In an open letter, Joly castigated established political parties, writing that the parties’ youth wings “often represent a nursery of privileged people ‘destined’ for political success.” She would eventually run for mayor of Montreal herself in 2013, hard-launching her political career.
She lost the mayoral race. But soon after, the call came from Ottawa and she began suiting up for a federal campaign. Amid the hubbub of races lost and races to be run, she decided to buy a piece of art every year for the rest of her life. When she was finally elected as MP in the Montreal riding of Ahuntsic-Cartierville in 2015, she splurged, buying three.
Going from an unknown mayoral candidate to one of the highest-ranking cabinet ministers in just nine years, Joly has seen her political career rocket. Now as foreign affairs minister, she’s dealing with heated global politics, often flying off to war zones and international conferences. Her name has even come up as a potential successor to the prime minister. Balancing it all, it seems, is a fine art.
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ON A BRIGHT, clear day in May, Joly, 45, is in her ministerial office overlooking the Ottawa River. She’s dressed in a white Babaton pantsuit (the now-standard-issue uniform of women politicians in North America) and wearing her hair in a low ponytail. On her coffee table, an assortment of art books sit under a plate of Hazelnut Ritter Sport chocolate that Joly nibbles on throughout the first of our two chats, which cover everything from art to Canada’s Israel policy to her family.
Joly is the fifth person in the Justin Trudeau Liberal government to hold the office of foreign affairs and the fourth woman ever to steer the country’s foreign policy. When Trudeau was first elected, he promised that Canada would return as a leader to the global stage, after the country stepped back from international institutions during the Stephen Harper era. Making that happen has been a tall order for Joly since she sat down in the chair in late 2021. In February 2022, Russia’s colonial small wars intensified with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The following September, tensions between Canada and India grew after Trudeau accused the Indian government of orchestrating the Vancouver-area murder of Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Meanwhile, the civil war in Sudan roared on, as did the war on the Gaza Strip, accompanied by increased hostilities between Israel and its regional neighbours following Hamas’ October 7 attack.
“Within three months of [me] being appointed...we [were] in crisis management,” Joly says. “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.”
During Joly’s tenure, Global Affairs Canada has also opened seven new embassies and re-established diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia with the appointment of an ambassador to the kingdom. Moves like this, Joly says, are tactical, a part of the “pragmatic diplomacy”—a term she unveiled in an October 2023 address at the Economic Club of Canada—approach she takes to her job: “If Canada is going to have a voice, we need to have relationships to leverage to make sure that we’re at the table when the big security conversations are happening.”
On the day we sat down in May, Norway, Spain and Ireland recognized Palestine as a state. At the United Nations earlier in the month, Canada abstained on a vote for Palestinian statehood. In a statement on the matter, Joly’s pragmatic diplomacy approach is apparent: “Canada is prepared to recognize the state of Palestine at the time most conducive to lasting peace, not necessarily as the last step along that path.”
“The Netanyahu government is a problematic government, and the Trudeau government does not see eye to eye with [them],” Joly says. Although Canada and Israel agree that Hamas should release the remaining October 7 hostages and that Hamas is a terrorist organization, “the problem we’re seeing right now is that the Netanyahu government is against the creation of a Palestinian state. We need to make sure we put pressure on, but right now, we have to be pragmatic.” It’s a diplomat’s answer—and it certainly doesn’t have the confident ring of 2015’s “Canada is back.”
Pragmatic diplomacy also means connecting with other “countries where we don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye,” Joly says. When travelling to those nations, she makes an effort to take meetings with women—Indigenous leaders in Brazil or members of parliament during visits to Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. And some of the women foreign ministers—namely, Germany’s Annalena Baerbock, Indonesia’s Retno L.P. Marsudi and South Africa’s Naledi Pandor—have a WhatsApp group. “We text each other a lot,” she says.
As for sitting at the tables where the big security conversations are happening—like the G7 foreign ministers’ table or at NATO—they’re apparently workplaces just like any other. And they function like any other workplace—sexism included. Joly has noticed that “when [women] present an idea, that idea is not necessarily heard until a male counterpart says it.” She and her allies often take turns repeating each other’s ideas in order to be heard. “We try to reinforce each other,” she says. “I say, ‘That’s a good idea, Annalena’ or ‘Yōko [Kamikawa of Japan], you’re absolutely right.’”
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WHEN WE SPEAK again by phone in July, Joly has just returned from a family vacation at a Quebec cottage (“a shack” she calls it, laughing) with the family of her husband, violin-maker and entrepreneur Félix Marzell. The two met when they were set up on a blind date by Soraya Martinez Ferrada, now the federal tourism minister. (Joly says her husband eschews politics to the point that if he had been told that his date was a politician-in-the-making, she’s not sure he would have shown up. Martinez Ferrada, for her part, told Marzell that he was meeting an entrepreneur.)
Part of a Francophone Quebecer family, Joly’s roots stretch back 13 generations in an area north of Laval. The Jolys were still there until the early 1970s, when the paternal family farm became one of several hundred properties to be expropriated by the Pierre Trudeau Liberal government to make room for Montreal’s Mirabel airport. In the aftermath, her father opted to study accounting. At university, he met Joly’s mother, a teacher who would encourage Joly and her two older brothers to learn English.
Joly, whose father was involved with the Quebec Liberal party, was drawn to politics from an early age. During the 1995 Quebec Referendum, Joly was 16, studying at a CEGEP and unable to vote. She fell in love with student politics instead and joined the student association. “That’s where I did my first strike,” she says with a chuckle, “because that’s part of any Quebec student-union experience.” Perhaps it was her penchant for pragmatism that appealed to students at her CEGEP. Joly campaigned with an all-woman team not on the issues raised by the referendum, but instead on installing more computers in the library—and she won.
Later, a lifelong dream of attending Oxford to study law came true when she won a scholarship that’s awarded to outstanding emerging leaders. “You could clearly see back in 2002 that she was an over-achiever and that she would do very well in whatever she would end up doing,” says then-fellow Oxford student and now federal court judge Guy Regimbald. (Regimbald notes that the two have not been in touch since shortly after exiting Oxford.) Although class debates would involve a lot of political discussions, Regimbald says Joly never indicated any partisanship. “Whatever she would decide on doing, she had the talent to get there,” he says. “But I never left Oxford thinking that the person I spent a year with would be [a] minister.”
Joséane Chrétien, who was enrolled at Oxford’s Brasenose college at the same time and also articled with Joly at the firm Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg, says it did not come as a surprise to see her friend sign up for political life. “It was natural for her to do that, a little bit more than private practice,” says Chrétien. Joly also became fast friends with another articling student, Mathieu Bouchard. The two shared an office and would bond over the long hours and intense work. In 2007, when she launched her conglomerate think tank/political party/magazine, Generation d’Idées, she tapped the politically minded Bouchard to be her policy adviser (he would go on to be a senior adviser for the Office of the Prime Minister). When she told him that she was running for mayor of Montreal in 2013, he says, “I remember thinking, ‘It’s crazy, but yes, let’s do it—I’m in.’”
In 2013, Montreal’s political landscape was a shattered one. There were allegations of corruption in the mayor’s office in addition to widespread corrupt practices across Quebec’s construction sector. In response, the mayor resigned. Into the fray stepped the virtually unknown 34-year-old Joly and a whole new political party. By the close of polls, she had defied expectations, landing in second place to long-time Quebec politico Denis Coderre. Says Bouchard, “If she’d had one more week of campaigning, she may have won.”
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WHEN THE CALL came to join the campaign for the Liberal leadership, it wasn’t Justin Trudeau who asked Joly to join but his brother, Sacha. The two had connected when Joly recruited him to assist with the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art foundation’s fundraising. In a 2013 interview, Sacha told the Toronto Star that Joly is “really a born networker. She knows everyone.... She’s a good uniter.”
Saying yes to Trudeau has shaped her life in more ways than one. When she was asked in 2021 if she would take on the job of foreign affairs minister, Joly initially declined. She’d long been trying for children with Marzell and was hoping to reduce her political obligations. “I was doing IVF, and I was [concerned] that being foreign minister would not allow me to have children,” she says. Still, the prime minister and his team insisted that she should take the gig. She consulted her family, who encouraged her to go for it. Two weeks after being appointed, there was more news: Joly was pregnant.
“The two main dreams of my life were happening at the same time,” she says. “[Being] a woman foreign minister and being able to bear a child was a message in itself. But, unfortunately, after 10 weeks, I lost the child.” Joly has since been through at least 10 cycles of IVF, sometimes taking appointments while on the go for her high-flying job. At one appointment in Vietnam, the doctor was from Ukraine and talked to Joly about her upset over the war.
Part of her reason for running in the 2013 mayoral election, she says, was that “it was the best way to be able to have a family.” Federal politics was something for later down the line. “But I guess life took a different path.”
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ON THE JULY AFTERNOON we reconnect, Joly has been gardening. Whenever she leaves the third-floor Montreal apartment she lives in with Marzell (Bouchard lives one floor below), she passes a tree surrounded by a planter box to which residents are invited to add their own flowers. She has just returned from a bilateral visit to Mexico and the end of the short Canada Day vacation is closing in, but she hasn’t stopped: She and Bouchard have been hard at work replacing the overgrown weeds in the box with perennials. “Here we were, in the heat, digging up the dirt and planting flowers just to make it look very nice,” says Bouchard. “But it was the dedication. That’s the way she is: She’ll set a goal, and she’ll get there.”
The wear and tear of politics, especially in an increasingly polarized political climate, is a challenge that Joly is keenly aware of. Politicians routinely cite the toxicity of public life when they exit. For Canadian women, the stakes remain incredibly high—especially for those in high-ranking positions. (Asked about any leadership ambitions, Joly would only say that Trudeau has her full support.)
Despite the challenges, Joly is adamant that no threats will get her to leave politics. “And I understand why women can be scared,” she says, “but people who harass—in French, I would say ‘les arsoneurs’—cannot win.”
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FOR HIS PRINT work All the Disasters of War, Martin Désilets—the artist whose postcards of Lebanon formed Joly’s first art acquisition—photographed each of the 82 prints that encompass Francisco Goya’s wretched and disturbing The Disasters of War series and then superimposed the images onto one another. The final image is an arresting cacophony of black ink that literally reconfigures Goya’s protest etchings.
Just as Joly’s political career has blossomed, so has her art collection. Her latest acquisition is a large-format work by another Montreal-based artist: Iranian multimedia artist Leila Zelli, whose most recent work evokes Iran’s nascent Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which took off in the aftermath of the death of Mahsa Amini. In the pieces that form the collection “A Chant Can Cross the Ocean,” figures are stamped in scattered, swirling masses. It, too, evokes protest.
In her job, Joly notes, she’ll likely never go to Iran. But for now, she says, “I’m trying to collect art that is in line with what I live every day.”