Speech by MP scorches at Burns
Celina Caesar-Chavannes was perhaps a surprising choice to deliver the Reply to the Laddies at the Speaker’s annual dinner in tribute to the poet Robert Burns on Parliament Hill on Monday night.
“Note that I am not Scottish,” said the Liberal MP for Whitby, Ont., who was born in Grenada.
Burns suppers can be fusty affairs, but, thanks to Caesar-Chavennes, this one was not.
The Speaker’s dinner is attended by cabinet ministers and MPs from several parties. The menu is traditional, as is the program. Dinner is preceded by the recital of Burns’ Address to a Haggis, and after dinner there is a series of toasts, their themes long-established though their texts are written by the speakers. First, Treasury Board President Jane Philpott delivered the Immortal Memory, a tribute to Burns.
Conservative MP Rob Nicholson offered an Address to the Lassies. It was then Caesar-Chavannes’ turn to deliver the Reply. “They said it was supposed to be satirical. They can’t expect me to say, ‘Thank you from the lassies,’ and sit down,” she told the National Post. “It was an opportunity to make people think.”
Much of the resulting speech was raucous and fun, portraying Burns as a loose-limbed “penile philanthropist” who had 12 children by five women. “If Robbie Burns were alive today, he would be black and on Maury Povich,” CaesarChavennes quipped.
But there was a serious edge amid the satire: a broadside on the politics of politics, much of which appeared to be aimed at her own political party.
She broached the subject of government ministers feeling the “burn” of recent ministerial changes, and cited another of the ministers in attendance that night.
“Speaking of Jody WilsonRaybould, if Robbie Burns was a member of our government, she would have been asked to remove him from our Parliament, not just our caucus, based on his exploits.
“If she didn’t succeed, she would have been fired. If she succeeded in removing Robbie Burns, she would have been fired. You can’t have an Indian doing that to the White Man. (David) Lametti can, you can’t. The lads are better at that sort of thing,” she said.
The recent ministerial shuffle moved Wilson-Raybould to Veterans Affairs from the Justice Department, where she was replaced by Montreal MP Lametti — a switch that has angered some Liberal caucus members. There have been many rumours about why Wilson-Raybould was moved, but none I have heard centre on her race or gender.
Caesar-Chavannes said she is tired of finding herself at the centre of such controversies, but she said she couldn’t give a speech that didn’t address the question of privilege.
“We need to shake the dust off old political institutions and traditions if we are going to allow new people in,” she said in an interview. “It beats you up to be talking up these issues and being forced to defend yourself. But if you want to add new people, you can’t continue to maintain the status quo. The status quo sometimes disenfranchises people.”
The speech is unlikely to go down well with the prime minister, despite his self-proclaimed feminism.
Caesar-Chavannes may not mind too much — she stepped down as parliamentary secretary for international development last September and has expressed doubts about politics being the right career path for her.
Last year she squabbled online with Maxime Bernier, now leader of the People’s Party of Canada, over issues of systemic racism. Bernier accused her of thinking the world revolves around her skin colour; she, in turn, called him out for white privilege.
That broader message on race and gender discrimination permeated every line of her speech on Monday. It was a crudely reductionist message at odds with her presence as a speaker in the most rarefied setting imaginable.
But she was also funny, unapologetic and provocative, claiming the poet wouldn’t be celebrated if he were black.
“If Robbie Burns was black, we wouldn’t be having this dinner. We would be at home watching his biopic on Lifetime and wondering why Whitney Houston married him,” she said. “Robbie Burns, if you were alive today and you were black, I may have given you my number.”
If Burns were alive, he would probably have embraced her message on enfranchisement — and immortalized her in verse. Scotland’s bard was aye a fool for a lively lassie.
WE NEED TO SHAKE THE DUST OFF OLD POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.