Celina Caesar-Chavannes recently sat down with Jordan Peterson and described how quickly her time as a Liberal MP went from “sunny ways” to dark days. Little of what Caesar-Chavannes says here about how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s behaviour is new, but since she, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott left parliament, these behaviours have been corroborated so many times that they should now be impossible to ignore.
Starry-eyed and hopeful about the government’s new sunny ways when elected, Caesar-Chavannes was about to quickly find out what working with a “Because it’s 2015” cabinet really meant.
Despite having no political experience, she was appointed Trudeau’s parliamentary secretary within a couple of months. She told Peterson it was a shock to win, and a shock to be in that job. But she says she was determined that she could do it.
Caesar-Chavannes says that her and Trudeau did not get off on the right foot, because, she says, she did not immediately answer, “Yes,” to the question of whether or not she trusted his judgment. “No. I have no reason to. I just met you,” she said she told him. According to her, Trudeau immediately took offence to this. “I realize at that moment the tension in the room got a little awkward,” she said.
“I ran. I was elected, he just had a different title. We both worked hard. But I had to appreciate him for whatever reason. He raked me over the coals for that,” she said.
Admittedly, this sounds funny to anyone who understands what he was actually asking at this point. Trudeau obviously wasn’t asking her for the kind of trust involved between husband and spouse.
On the one hand, Caesar-Chavannes comes off from the get-go as unnecessarily combative, as if she’s never had a boss before. Every office has a Celina — someone who’s too big for their britches, hasn’t yet put in their time for the type of respect and power they want to wield, and who immediately sees fault in everyone but themselves.
On the other hand, someone in the top position in the country should have been able to deal with someone like Caesar-Chavannes with a light touch without becoming insulted. Alas, Trudeau had only ever been a substitute teacher, and does not appear to have acquired these real-world people skills.
When asked by Peterson who was actually running the show in the Liberal government when she was there, Caesar-Chavannes responded, “Canadians would remember that when Harper was PM, that people kept saying that the prime minister’s office was really centralized, all decisions were made there — nothing changed with Trudeau.
“It was the central office, it was his principal secretaries: Gerry Butts, Katie Telford, that were primarily running the show. I don’t think I’m the only one who would say this. I think that when (former finance minister) Bill Morneau left, he said the same thing,” she said.
Communications in the House of Commons were tightly controlled. Caesar-Chavannes was told, “Read this speech, say what’s on this speech and don’t deviate.” She complained about cookie cutter tweets: “Everyone sends out a tweet and they all look the same.”
And it didn’t take long for Caesar-Chavannes to realize that the “Because 2015” cabinet wasn’t going to be all rainbows and butterflies. (Parliamentary secretaries are not members of cabinet, but they represent cabinet to the rest of Parliament.)
“Between 2015-2019 I was the only Black female Canadian elected. I wasn’t going to complain too much. I didn’t want to ruffle feathers,” she told Peterson. But she thought, “something isn’t right.” She was told make sure she showed up for a picture on a certain date. It turned out that it was to commemorate an occasion that involved Black history. She quickly started to notice a pattern. “I was invited to three events that were Black-focused, after that, I was done,” she said.
“Tokenism is very disenfranchising, very dehumanizing…. I’m not allowed to speak to media, I’m not allowed to speak in the house, I’m not being sent anywhere. What kind of trip does that play on your mind? What does that do to the mind of a person when they know that the only thing that they’re there for is like, ‘omg, look at this I’m Black,’ and, ‘omg, look at these (gesturing to her breasts), I’m a woman.’” Overall, she said she felt, “duped and betrayed,” by the Liberal government.
At one point she told him, “If I’m here to fill any gender or racial gap within your cabinet, then I don’t want this role.”
In addition to having to deal with being used as a prop for her for gender and race, there was also the explosive childish antics that Trudeau has become known for which has sent ministers fleeing from his sinking ship.
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Later, Caesar-Chavannes came to Trudeau to make peace, but it did not go well. According to her, as soon as she opened her mouth and said, “Justin I’m s..,” the room became tense: “There was no words. It was a glare. It was this reddening of the face. It was the exhalation of his voice… And I was stopped in my tracks with the glare, the huff, and he got up from his seat and left, and I froze. Because at that moment, I knew that this person actually could make or break the rest of my life.” Trudeau sounds like an human resources nightmare. No wonder his cabinet never complains about his constant jet-setting and frequent absence in the House of Commons. They’re probably relieved.
Peterson, an eminently qualified clinical psychologist, suggests Trudeau might be a wounded narcissist, which is essentially someone who’s used to being a compliment magnet, whose ego has been severely wounded and now constantly needs veneration. Sounds about right.
Several other ministers have complained about Justin Trudeau’s behaviour before jumping ship. Jody Wilson-Raybould expressed that she wished she’d never met him, having once thought he was an “honest and good person, when, in truth, he would so casually lie to the public,” and from her description of events, gaslight her for doing the right thing.
And it wasn’t just women whose expertise he had no time for. Bill Morneau has suggested that Trudeau runs his government in such a way that policy rationales were cast aside in order to score political points — cutting big cheques during COVID was the more popular thing for Trudeau to do. And we know how he loves to be loved.
And former foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau, who was an astronaut before politics, has said: “The prime minister’s aloofness led me to conclude that he did not consider my advice useful.” He added that Trudeau was not very good at international relations, nor did he value the importance of a foreign affairs minister. Enter Mélanie Joly to help prove Garneau’s point.
Asked by Peterson why she didn’t go to the media about Trudeau’s behaviour towards herself and others at the time, she suggested the media wouldn’t be interested: “The Canadian media has still managed to glorify this individual and not hold him to account.” Caesar-Chavannes felt that legacy media allowed Trudeau to evade the consequences of his behaviour, and that these consequences ended up falling more on anyone who dared to stand up to the PM. Some things never change.
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