Philippe Couillard

Location: Quebec | Profession: Politician

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Philippe Couillard

Philippe Couillard was born in 1957 and grew up in Montreal. After performing well in high school, he was accepted into medical school and, at the age of seventeen, entered a field that he wouldn’t leave for another forty years. He studied at the University of Montreal and worked at the city’s Hôpital Saint-Luc. In 1992 he took a posting in Dharan, Saudi Arabia where he lived with his family for four years, working at a local hospital. Upon returning, he began teaching at the University of Sherbrooke until 2003, when he ran for the Liberal Party of Quebec in the riding of Mont-Royal. The party won the election, ousting the Parti Québécois, and Couillard was appointed Minister of Health and Social Services.

Philippe Couillard

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Coming of Age

“I remember my twentieth birthday clearly. It was during the summer following my third year of med school and I had accepted a placement on the Côte Nord in a little town near Labrador called Blanc Sablon. It was a strange place to be posted, but I had chosen it on a whim as part of my desire to get out into the world and try something new – even though that world only stretched to the provincial border. It was radically different than anything I had known. Unlike my classmates who had stayed in Montreal, worked in hospitals and sorted files, I was doing actual house calls, dealing with the First Nations populations and performing basic surgery – all at twenty years of age. The desire to do something different, to take the road less travelled paid off: I got the broadest, most well-rounded introduction to the medical profession.”