I bought into this notion that we were going to do things differently, that we were going to be bold and transformative … and that didn’t happen.
SNC-Lavalin had little to do with leaving Liberals, Caesar-Chavannes says
This whole hashtag, ‘Add women, change politics,’ only works if you actually change politics when you add women. Otherwise you get the status quo.
OTTAWA— Celina Caesar-Chavannes says her decision to leave politics had little to do with the SNC-Lavalin scandal, and a lot to do with the preceding three years of Liberal politics in Ottawa.
Because the former Whitby MP’s decision to leave government happened against the backdrop of the scandal that rocked the Liberal government in 2019, Caesar-Chavannes said her story got lumped together with the drama unfolding around Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott.
But Caesar-Chavannes told the Star Thursday that her upcoming memoir will detail deeper roots of dissatisfaction with the Trudeau brand of politics.
“My story is not intertwined with SNC-Lavalin at all … but the moment that I came out and supported Jody, it appears that everyone was lumping things together,” Caesar-Chavannes said in an interview.
“I think, at the end of the day, the commonality was there was this sense of if you speak up and you push back, you will get pushed aside or you will get thrown out (of caucus). I think the difference between me and Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Ms. Philpott was I was just ready to walk. I had three years of BS that I was dealing with, and I just thought ‘yeah. I’m good. I’m outta here.’”
Caesar-Chavannes said the exact details of her experience will have to wait for the release of her book — scheduled for February 2021.
But in a conversation with the Star, she gave the broad outline of why she came to the decision to leave Ottawa.
Ottawa felt “very uncomfortable” from the start, after she was first elected in 2015. But it wasn’t the work of politics or the daily partisan cut-and-thrust, but “challenges that I had within my own party.”
“I didn’t mind battling the opposition in terms of policy. But when it came to the support and what I felt to be almost a tokenistic role, a role where I was kind of pushed to the side of my own party, and over the years it kind of became more and more apparent, then I thought … I’m not going to stay at a table where love is no longer being served.”
Caesar-Chavannes said the Liberals had made a point of talking about doing politics different, that diversity is Canada’s strength, and about feminism.
“I bought into this notion that we were going to do things differently, that we were going to be bold and transformative … and that didn’t happen,” said Caesar-Chavannes.
“This whole hashtag ‘ add women, change politics’ only works if you actually change politics when you add women. Otherwise you get the status quo. Otherwise you get people who morph into the pre-existing structure. And that’s not what we want.”
Caesar-Chavannes talked about strict party discipline and pressure to toe the party line within caucus — something that plenty of politicians complain about in Ottawa, but most comply with.
When it is pointed out that another Liberal MP first elected in 2015, Beaches-East York MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, has been able to criticize the government without being expelled from caucus, Caesar-Chavannes said she’s “thought a lot about Nate since I left politics.”
Erskine-Smith established very early on that he could vote against the government and dissent from within the ranks, Caesar-Chavannes said, while she “tried to tiptoe within the lines, still tried to stay as cautious as possible.”
“And then end of 2017-2018, I thought ‘screw this, I’m just going to say whatever I want,’ ” Caesar-Chavannes said.
She now has the opportunity to do just that, in “Can You Hear Me Now?,” a book billed as part memoir, part leadership book. It hits shelves in February.