Early Life and Career
Marleau was born Diane Lebal in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, one of three children raised by a single mother in a low-income household. She was a childhood friend of Marie-Paule Charette, who later became a Senator and president of the Liberal Party.
She studied Commerce at the University of Ottawa, but left after three years when she married fellow student Paul Marleau, with whom she had three children: Brigitte, Donald and Stéphane, and moved to Sudbury. She worked as the secretary to a medical doctor for five years, prior to the introduction of Medicare. She later said that this experience made her realize the importance of a publicly-funded health system, saying "I was the one who had to collect the bills. It gave me an understanding of what it means when people are obliged to pay to see a doctor."
Marleau returned to Laurentian University as a mature student, and completed a Bachelor's Degree in Economics (1976). She worked as an accountant, managed an office for a firm of chartered accountants (Thorne and Riddell and then with Collins, Barrow-Maheux Noiseux), and operated a restaurant she co-owned with her husband. She also served on the boards of Laurentian University and Laurentian Hospital. Marleau worked on Judy Erola's campaign in the 1980 federal election, and later credited Erola as a role model for her own career in public life.
Read more about this topic: Diane Marleau
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)