Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef says she only found out last week in an emotional conversation with her mother, after being approached by the Globe and Mail, that a fundamental part of her inspiring personal narrative — her birth in Afghanistan — wasn’t true.

“She was able to give me a call back the night after we did an especially successful town hall on electoral reform in Kitchener-Waterloo. And so we’re on the highway, on our way back from Kitchener to Toronto, and I get the call — and we didn’t even get too many words in before I just..asked the team to pull over,” she said on CTV’s Your Morning Thursday after the Globe’s Bob Fife revealed the 31-year old minister was actually born in Iran.

“And then’s when I found out. It was actually about a week ago. For her, it wasn’t a big deal. Iran certainly didn’t accept us as citizens. We were always Afghan — the food, the culture, the clothes, the family, the language — it’s all Afghan. And so for her, and our culture, it never mattered. It didn’t make a difference. And she was sorry. And she’s still sorry. I’m still getting text messages.”

In a cabinet that has some compelling backstories, such as an infrastructure minister who survived torture in India, Monsef and her family’s escape from the Taliban was arguably the most compelling: a refugee who became a cabinet minister, a model for the thousands of new Syrian-Canadians, and the first Afgan-Canadian MP.

President Obama singled her out for special attention in his address to Parliament, noting she was an example of how refugees seize the opportunities they’re given.

“Like the girl who fled Afghanistan by donkey and camel and jet plane, and who remembers being greeted in this country by helping hands and the sound of robins singing. And today, she serves in this chamber, and in the cabinet, because Canada is her home,” he said.

Monsef’s story is reminiscent of that of another child of refugees who rose to prominence in North American politics. In 1997, when she was Secretary of State, The Washington Post revealed that the story Madeleine Albright had been told by her parents about their Christian identity and flight from Czechoslovakia had belied the fact that they were actually Jewish, and that her grandparents had perished in the Holocaust.

In its essence, very little of Monsef’s story has changed. But acknowledging that it “resonated with many Canadians”, she followed her CTV appearance Thursday with a press release she said she hoped would clear up any “misconceptions”.

The biggest being that she and her sister were in fact born in Mashhad, Iran, approximately 200 kilometres from the Afghan border, and not in Afghanistan.

After her parents were married in Herat, Afghanistan, near the Iranian border, the security situation became untenable, Monsef explained in the release.

“No longer safe in their home town, my parents decided not to take risks and went to Mashhad, Iran, where they could be safe – with the hope of soon returning to the place their families called home for generations. While we were technically safe in Iran, we did not hold any status there and like the thousands of other Afghan refugees, we were not afforded all of the same rights and privileges given to Iranian citizens,” the statement reads.

“After my father’s death, we travelled back and forth between Afghanistan and Iran when the security situation permitted it.”

Though the Prime Minister’s Office says it was completely caught off-guard by the revelation, which managed to go unnoticed in the cabinet vetting process — Monsef herself was somewhat ambiguous about her birthplace in an early June interview with Bob Fife while he was still the host of CTV’s Question Period.

“So you were born in Afghanistan, right?” Fife asked Monsef then.

“I believe I was,” Monsef answered lightheartedly.

Though Monsef told CTV Thursday morning that she was initially mad about the story coming out — and then mad at her mother — she’s now mostly angry at herself.

“Believe it or not, I forgot…You tell your story so many times that it becomes a story, and not your story. I forgot what we gave up to come here. I forgot what she gave up to come here,” she said.

“And now I’m discovering that all these years, she’s been carrying burdens that I can’t even imagine. So I’m mad at myself because I actually have no right to be angry at her.”