Robert-Falcon Ouellette: my mom 'sacrificed her soul in order to see me succeed'

By the time he entered junior high, Robert-Falcon Ouellette had begun to realize just how much his single mom had sacrificed for him. 

Attending a rough-and-tumble school in Calgary, he struggled to keep his head above water. 

"I wasn't doing very well,I was actually failing out of school," said the new Liberal MP.

I was walking around school with an X-Acto knife in my pocket, because there were gangs around that were beating people up... and I had to defend myself.- Robert-Falcon Ouellette

Ouellette's mother, Sharon, was raising him on her own. To keep her son safe – and make sure he got a good education – she made the tough decision to send her son to private school.

But with the family barely surviving on her meagre income, she needed to find a way to pay for his $10,000 tuition. She spent days searching for a loan, ultimately convincing her employer to sign a letter of reference on her behalf.

Finally, Ouellette was on his way to Strathcona-Tweedsmuir, one of the best high schools in western Canada.

With the fanciest clothes his mother could find at K-Mart, he walked in the front door. 

"No one knows where you're from," said Ouellette, about his first days at the school. "They looked at me and assumed that I should be there - and they ensured that I'd be successful at everything that I did." 

Ouellette's mother passed away eight years ago, but the profound impact of her sacrifice is still clear in her son's mind:

I recognize what she did for me - it was this great gift. She sacrificed her body and her soul in order for me to succeed.- Robert-Falcon Ouellette

Hear more from Robert-Falcon Ouellette and his constituents on this week's DNTO, Saturday Nov. 7 at 3:00pm on CBC Radio One.