Celina Caesar-Chavannes’ memoir about growing up in Canada as an immigrant, to her time in Canadian politics and beyond, is a story of a woman becoming more comfortable with her purpose, even as she faces challenges.
The clinical research management entrepreneur, inclusion advocate, and former parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and to the Minister of International Development et la Francophonie, writes about several themes in this book that will show you what happens when a person willing to speak truth to power gets a seat at the table with the powerful.
She describes her Grenadian parents as expecting her to behave like a “proper little Caribbean girl.” As a teenager, their expectations felt like a box she was confined to. When she writes about this period of her life, it’s clear that she knew who she was. The vision that her parents had of her wasn’t compatible with the vision she had of herself.
I appreciated her spending time on her youthful mistakes and how they made her feel. She spent her university years rarely going to class and lying to her parents about her grades, while she was hanging out with boys and taking amphetamines to cram before exams. There came a time when she was forced to be honest about all of it, and it challenged her to face her mistakes. Throughout the book, there’s a theme of using your flaws to bring out your strengths, and sometimes seeing our imperfections as strengths.
She writes that we should “empower others and create the sense of humanity that is so often lacking in our society because we are too busy trying to show off to our neighbours instead of trying to show up for them.”
It is good to know that Caesar-Chavannes is able to critique her own careerism. While she was building a successful clinical research company, she admits that her marriage suffered. Her introspective analogy of her life as a bus that she thought was fine and going in the right direction, only to discover that she was letting success at work lull her into a life she thought was comfortable, is a realisation that will resonate with many self-described achievers.
Her journey to politics, from slight interest to getting elected to Canada’s Parliament wasn’t straight, but that was the smooth part compared to her time as an MP. It was never her life’s goal to be in politics. She always had big dreams for herself, but none of them included politics. If it wasn’t for her far-more politically-minded children and supportive husband, and the misfortune of the long-time MP for her riding passing about 18 months before the 2015 Canadian federal election, I’m not sure she would have gone into politics. You get the sense as she writes about this period that the timing was right for her, or someone like her. Within that short time, she chose a party to run for, watched the by-election results (which she lost) in her home with then opposition leader Justin Trudeau, and then won in the federal election. To read her tell the story, makes it feel like it happened so fast. Despite her ascension into the political world, she never let it get to her head.
Her political goal was to make an impact for BIPOC communities and stay authentic to herself as she promised her constituency. Bringing young women of colour to Parliament Hill and her riding office was her way of letting them see that someone who looks like them can aspire to be in those spaces too.
From day one, she told the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that she didn’t want to be a token in his government. Even as he was giving her the job as his parliamentary secretary, both he and his key staffers knew who Celina Caesar-Chavannes was. I could not help but remember earlier on in the book how her parents did not pay attention to what she was saying about herself. In her parents’ case, it’s understandable, because that’s what parents do. In contrast, she explicitly told Justin Trudeau and his staff that she didn’t want to be tokenised, but they weren’t ready for it then, and never were. She wasn’t going to be his smiling Black face that he could use as a prop and not tell him the truth when he needed to hear it. That is why she writes, “Telling the whole truth might not work in my favour, but my lies had landed me in enough trouble in the past that I was most definitely always going to tell the truth here. Parliament was no place for a Black woman to be caught lying.”
Her proudest moment in politics was as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of International Development et la Francophonie where she was involved in the policy to advance women both in Canada and internationally. That’s when she “felt like the entire government of Canada was standing on stages with me, boldly promoting women’s rights as human rights.” Still, even as she was finding success in International Development, she felt disrespected around Parliament in small ways. Daily occurrences of microaggressions, which is the death of a thousand cuts many BIPOC know all too well.
She included a couple of her viral moments in the book for those of you who don’t know her or didn’t follow her story closely. Her powerful one-minute speech in the House of Commons in 2017 about hairstyles and wardrobe not being a barrier to women being competent professionals in business and politics, and her 2018 Huffington Post article, “A Love Letter to Black Women.”
What I found very disappointing about how she was treated by the Liberal Party of Canada was not just the tokenism, but how they didn’t support her when she received racist online attacks by another MP. They let that MP, the trolls, and the right-wing press attack her without standing with her against the bullies.
I appreciated her honesty about her mistakes, what she was expecting from her time in politics, but also her admission that she and others “were all accomplices in the prime minister’s behaviour.” Trudeau has (or had) such a glowing image on the international stage, but behind closed doors, he can be verbally abusive. In a bad way, Trudeau is a good representation for Canada: a photogenic friendly face masking an ugly daily and systemic reality.
For those who have been wondering why she gave up her seat at the table, she explains that she “could no longer be part of the herd mentality that party politics induces.” She wasn’t going to stay in a party that talked about diversity but didn’t want to be inclusive. She wasn’t going to be the Black face who stays in the background of photo-ops and keeps quiet. She was going to be vocal, and if her style of representation made her fellow politicians feel uncomfortable, then so be it. Bringing “unapologetic authenticity” to her seat at the table of Canadian politics and representing the issues that matter to Canadians by doing politics differently was what that chapter of her life was about. That chapter is closed, and now a new chapter is being written.
Celina Caesar-Chavannes doesn’t want young people to read her story and want to be like her. She wants them to be better than her while being opinionated, courageous, and distinctive. That is what she wants readers in Canada and around the world to hear, because as she writes at the end of her acknowledgements: “It is not enough to hear my voice. We need to hear you, too.”
Words Phil Roberts
