OTTAWA -- Former MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes says she misses politics despite a challenging four years as an elected official that saw her quit the Liberal caucus.
“It's in the blood, it's in the bloodstream and once you get bit that's it,” Caesar-Chavannes said Monday in an interview on CTV’s Power Play.
After a tumultuous time as a federal politician, she’s looking back with a new perspective.
“When we think about our democracy as the centre or the most central point of our country, the way in which we exert power that the people have to sway political will, can't happen every four years -- we have to hold our governments [to] account in between those four years,” she said.
“We have to make sure that we're not just using our vote, but using our voice as well to make the changes that we want to see. I want to see that exercised more.”
Caesar-Chavannes ran unsuccessfully in the 2014 Whitby-Oshawa, Ont. byelection, was elected as the Liberal MP for that riding in 2015, and quickly got promoted to a parliamentary secretary for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
By 2019 she was sitting in the Independent benches and decided not to run again.
In her book "Can You Hear Me Now?” which comes out this week, she offers new insight into her pre-political life, her experience inside the House of Commons, and opens up about how she found her voice after a blowout with Trudeau over her decision to leave the party.
In the interview, Caesar-Chavannes says that when she signed on to “Team Trudeau,” the Liberal platform promised government done differently, with a new focus on feminism and diversity, though as the years went on the bold policies she wanted to help implement didn’t all materialize.
“I bought that product, and I tried to sell that product,” she said. “I couldn't reconcile just sort of putting my values aside and my principles around certain issues, and then staying with something that I knew really wasn't a fit.”
The former MP and now senior advisor at Queen’s University says that, at times, she felt tokenized as a Black woman on Parliament Hill. The books details her experience with depression, and how her time as an MP wore down her mental health. She is also critical of the amount of power political staffers have over those who are elected, and the lack of face-time she was able to secure with Trudeau.
It's these reasons, and less so the SNC-Lavalin scandal, that led to her decision to leave caucus, she says. Though, the timing of her departure came at a particularly challenging moment for the prime minister.
Caesar-Chavannes announced her move to sit as an independent in March 2019, after Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott left cabinet amid the corruption controversy. As it happened, she had first discussed her plans to not run again on the day in February when Wilson-Raybould left. The call with Trudeau didn’t go well, she says.
“It was met with a lot of animosity towards me leaving at a time when he was perceived to have two powerful women of colour leave his administration at the same time, and he wasn't happy with it, and I wasn't happy with the tone that he was using with me either,” she said.
At the time, a PMO spokesperson described the conversations as “emotional” but denied that Trudeau acted with hostility.
Months later the pair had a friendly personal meeting and vowed to “move forward and work together for the greater good.”
During the Power Play interview, Caesar-Chavannes didn’t say under what conditions she’d consider a return to elected office. She’s hoping her words will prompt more people who want politics to be done differently to think about how that will be accomplished.
“When I wrote this book I wanted people to think about relationships differently, think about systems differently, think about their communities differently, but think about themselves differently, and how they operate within these systems,” she said.
With files from CTV Power Play’s Caroline O’Neill
