Kari Labossière

Kari Annette Labossière (born April 30th, 1958) is a French-Canadian politician and currently Member of the House of Commons for Québec as well as the Deputy Leader of the Progressive Party of Canada. She is the daughter of a Progressive Member of the House of Commons, Robert Labossière, who served from 1954-1968.

In 1984, she ran for a seat in the House of Commons but was unsuccessful. However, she would run again in the 1988 general election and was successfully elected. In 1992, she ran for a second term and was re-elected by an even bigger margin of the vote.

In 1995, she would run for leader of the Progressive Party of Canada alongside other Progressive MPs John Mason and Mathieu Tremblay but would end up coming distant second to Mason, although she would end up becoming the party's Deputy Leader. However, only thirteen months later on February 27, 1996, she would abruptly resign from the position due to reasons related to prioritizing her family and her home life, although she kept serving as an MP for her province despite her resignation from the Deputy Leader office and would run for another term in the general election that year after.

Early Life and Education (1958-1980)
Labossière was born in as a first and only child. Her parents were Aurore Lemaître, a first-generation immigrant from France, and Progressive MP Robert Labossière. She was elected student council president of her high school, Academie Les Estacades, and her yearbook predicted that she would become a politician. She graduated from in 1980 with an integrated honours Bachelor of Laws (LLB) combined with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in political science.

Labossière credited her father with being the primary influence in her decision to pursue a career of her own in law and politics, essentially following in his footsteps. She'd explain in a 1995 interview that her "passion for the law and arts" began when she was "only a young teenager", and that if it weren't for her the older Labossière's tenure in the House of Commons, she would have "gotten into psychology or something jazzy like that".

Personal Life
In 1979, Labossière and her then boyfriend and future husband, Henry Mathieu, who she met while attending McGill University already had plans to fully integrate themselves in Montreal and did so with the rest of the money they had after she graduated the following year. They would get married in 1982 and in the year after, they would welcome their first of two daughters, Aurélie, to the world, with their second daughter, Arianne, coming three years after in 1986.