← The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
493. The Brutal Shadow of Equity In Canada | Celina Caesar-Chavannes
01:28:27
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with entrepreneur, author, and prior member of Justin Trudeau’s administration, Celina Caesar-Chavannes. They discuss her time in the Canadian government, the Prime Minister’s modus operandi, the use of tokenism over substantive contribution, and why she ultimately decided to resign. Celina Caesar-Chavannes is a dynamic leader with an impressive track record across business, politics, and advocacy. Currently completing her PhD in Neuroscience, Celina’s research focuses on how cognitive and emotional processes intersect to influence leadership, decision-making, and self-actualization. She translates these insights into practical strategies for Cognitive Optimized Inclusive Leadership (COIL) - a program she designed to help individuals and organizations harness the power of their brain for authentic leadership, fostering deeper self-awareness, well-being, and transformation. Her leadership programs emphasize the importance of integrating neuroscience...
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- [00:15]
Jordan Peterson
Hello, everyone. Canadians have benefited from or suffered under the rule of Justin Trudeau for a substantial amount of time now. And during that time, his administration, his government, has been plagued by a number of scandals, some greater and some lesser. One of the more unreported scandals has to do with the sequential departure of some of the more powerful and opinionated figures in his cabinet and his government, including many of the women that he so triumphantly appointed to his cabinet. What would you say, founded on the idea of equity in 2015? I've been. I've reached out to many of the people who've abandoned his ship, you might say, on the Liberal side, to talk, to find out what it was like working with Justin, with Prime Minister Trudeau. And generally they've refused to talk to me, not impolitely or anything like that, but it just hasn't been successful. But today it was successful because I got to talk to Selena Caesar Chavan, who was elected in the writing of Whitby in 2015, who left her own business, divested herself of her own business to do so, and then was appointed Parliamentary secretary. And she told us what it was like. She worked very closely with Trudeau, or in principle, very closely. The story is much more complicated than that for about four years until she decided that, to put it bluntly, she'd had more than enough. As you will discover if you attend to this podcast, which I would highly recommend, particularly if you're Canadian. It is devastating, really. It's a shocking interview. I would say it's an emotional interview. She's very articulate. She's very careful. She's very forthright and revealing, much more so than I might have expected. And the picture she paints is not a pretty one. Seriously, not a pretty one. And everyone who has the opportunity should listen to this if they're citizens in Canada, because you need to know just exactly who it is that's running the show. So join us and find out. So, Selena, we'll start, I think, by just giving people an overview, if you would, about what role you played with the Trudeau Liberals, and expand on that, if you would, a bit, so that people who are listening from other countries have a more comprehensive idea of how the Canadian federal system works. The electoral system.
- [03:02]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah. So I was elected in 2015, and I should say before that, the Member of Parliament in which my writing or my journal jurisdiction, my town is, passed away, he was the former federal minister, really well liked individual. So in 2014, that happened. And as you would run in any other election, a by election was triggered at that time. And I lost the by election when that happened. Of course, the next time to run was the general election. And a general election in Canada runs pretty much as any other democracy. You are voting for the person in your riding. You're not, not like the United States where you vote directly for the Prime Minister or directly for the President. You vote for the person in your particular jurisdiction. And in 2015, I ran again for the Liberals and I won that election. So I was a member of Parliament for my town of Whitby that I've lived in for over a dozen years, and then immediately was appointed to parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister. And basically the parliamentary secretary is, I would say, like the right hand of the Prime Minister. If the Prime Minister goes left, you go right, he goes north, you go south. And it's really a tag team role when you're appointed to that position.
- [04:29]
Jordan Peterson
So what had attracted you first to political life and then more specifically, why did you decide to stand for office under the rubric of the Liberals, rather? So for everyone watching and listening, Canada really has, for all intents and purposes, three main political parties. There's Liberals who usually govern Canada, and they're a centrist party. You have the Conservatives, they're a center right party. And you have the New Democrats, and they're a center left party that there's some fringe parties, but we'll leave them out of this discussion, including the separatists. So you decided to run for the Liberals, and of course they're in power most of the time in Canada and are currently under the leadership of Justin Trudeau. And what attracted you to the Liberals and, and to. And perhaps to do Mr. Trudeau as well.
- [05:20]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
So I'll answer the last question first. Really coming to Canada, being from a Caribbean background, we tended to vote a lot Liberal. My parents voted Liberal, I've always voted Liberal. So it was really more an affinity toward a party that had welcomed people from the Caribbean into Canada. It was really affinity towards a leader who at the time was very dynamic. But I would say that getting involved in politics was for a different sort of reasoning at the time. Before entering in, I was running Canada's first ever national population study or epidemiology study on neurological conditions. And what some of your viewers or listeners might not know is that oftentimes, even in Canada, with the social safety net of healthcare, there are some challenges around people being able to access that health care system in a fair manner. And what we were finding with that national study, people who were looking after their Loved ones with Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's or even epilepsy or Rett syndrome on the lower end of the age continuum, they were having significant challenges looking after their loved ones. They would have to either divorce their partner if they were making too high of an income, they would have to divorced so that their income would drop and their partner could get services, or they'd have to move from province to province to be able to get the drugs covered under a particular provincial or for the us, a statewide formulary. And I just thought that that was unacceptable in a G7 country and wanted to get into politics, particularly to deal with those issues, to have a national brain strategy and a national senior strategy. And I thought at the time the best way to do was through a liberal government. I knew that the prime minister, well, the leader at the time, was very much in favor of science, of healthcare. But to be honest, the study that I was running across the country was a $15 million investment from the previous government, the Harper government. So I could have gone either way. But my affinity was more towards the Liberals at the time, and I thought that we'd be able to get a national brain strategy and a national senior strategy in place.
- [07:48]
Jordan Peterson
So now you became parliamentary secretary how soon after you won the 2015 election?
- [07:54]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Within a couple months. So by December of 2015, I was appointed.
- [08:00]
Jordan Peterson
And had you had any previous political experience at that point?
- [08:04]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Absolutely, Absolutely none. I didn't even take a political science course, to be honest with you. No political background.
- [08:13]
Jordan Peterson
So was it a shock to find yourself in that job?
- [08:17]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
I think the first shock came when I actually won the election. I knew that I'd be able to win. I was out knocking doors. I knew sort of the machinery behind running. And so as my. Because I lost the by election, my counterpart was obviously in Ottawa. I took advantage of that, knocked on 40,000 doors in Whitby to be able to win the general election. But it was a shock to win because the riding or the place that I lived was very conservative. The provincial counterpart was conservative, the former federal minister was conservative. And so it's like a Republican sort of hotspot. And so I was very shocked to win that election, but I knew people trusted me at the door. And when they said, you know, Selena, when you get in there, politics is going to change you, I. I looked back. I looked them dead in the eye, and I said, watch me. I will make sure that I stay true to who I am. So it was a. The first shock was actually getting in the door, becoming parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister. Not necessarily a shock to me. I knew I had, although I didn't have the political experience, I knew I had the smarts to do it. I knew that I had the capability. And because of the by election, the Prime Minister had been in, in Whitby at least four times. So we had developed a relationship. So it wasn't like it was coming out of left field. I knew that if he needed someone on the ground, listening, being attuned to not just what's happening in Whitby or across the country, but those particular nuances that maybe his experience didn't lend him the ability to understand, I knew that having me as a parliamentary secretary will fill that gap quite well. So that wasn't a shock for me.
- [10:02]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, okay. So it was more winning the election. So can I, can, can you fill people in with regard to your background in general? So you said you had run a large study and how, how old were you when you ran for office in Whitby? And what was your, what was your educational and experiential background prior to, to running? I'm just trying to get, just trying to place you in everyone's imagination.
- [10:25]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah. So I was 41 when I ran. And my background? I have a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology from the University of Toronto. I have two MBAs, one in healthcare management and the other executive MBA from Rotman School of Management again at the University of Toronto and really ran a very successful research based healthcare management firm running pharmaceutical clinical trials, adjudication processes for research firms, and mainly around neurological conditions. So most of my career in business was running research, but particularly around the brain.
- [11:13]
Jordan Peterson
Was that a private company that was doing that research? How was that structured?
- [11:18]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Absolutely, it was a private company that was running it. And so I'd get contracts with pharmaceutical companies or with nonprofits, you know, like working with Parkinson's Society Canada or Alzheimer's Society, helping them run their adjudication processes, or partnering even with the government of Canada. And that last large study that I did, running their national epidemiology study. So it was a private firm that I ran for over 10 years, award winning firm. And, and did that quite successfully for the time. But it was really focused on the first love of my life, which was the brain.
- [11:54]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, and that was your company. And how did you go about. Okay, well that's a difficult thing to manage to found and run a private company that's research focused. So tell me a little bit more about that. How did you have the idea and actually how did you manage that on the business side, because that's. That it seems to me that that's a rare thing to do. So.
- [12:18]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Absolutely.
- [12:18]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. So tell me about that.
- [12:21]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
So very rare. So I have to go back a little bit for your listeners because I think this is important. I finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, first in my family to attend university. Immigrated from Grenada when I was 2 years old and really lost myself at university. Graduated high school, top of my class, 99 average, but lost myself in university. It took me 6 years to finish a 3 year degree. Graduated with a 1.58 GPA. Jordan, if you can imagine how much, how hard you have to work outside of school to get a 1.58 in school. I was wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Obviously you can't apply to medical school with a 1.58 GPA and was lost for two years. I ended up working as a forklift operator in a factory for a couple of years. And then I realized, you know what? The university gave me the piece of paper and they didn't put my GPA on it. So I went back, I did an undergraduate research course, fourth year course, ended up getting an A in that. Fell in love with research, working on nutrition and Alzheimer's disease and then just started to work my way up. Worked at the Tanz Neuroscience Building as a research coordinator. And then I decided, well, you know, I could be a research manager. Let me do my mba, become a research manager and see what happens with that. And of course, the juxtaposition with that is you can't get the research management job if you don't have enough experience and you can't get the experience without the job. By that time I had two kids. We were living in this red down basement apartment, basically dumpster diving for our furniture. And I realized that life wasn't going to keep me down that way. So I started a company because I knew working in research that the most valuable asset to any of the principal investigators I was working with was a good solid research coordinator. So I decided that maybe I could use that as a launch pad as a freelance research coordinator. And I started that for a little while until the first pharmaceutical company called me and said, we have a clinical trial for a pediatric epilepsy clinical trial. Can you find us some principal investigators? And of course, when you're down and out and you're, you, you know, you're trying your best to get your family out of a situation, the first thing that I said was, absolutely, but finding a pediatric Neuros neuropsychologist To run a clinical trial in Toronto was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but with grit and determination. I found three of them for that company. And the first paycheck I got with that with Resolve Research Solutions, which was the name of my company, was a down payment to my first home. I'm a hustler, you know, I know how to work hard. I really studied with that mba, used that MBA to create the blueprint for a company that ended up being very successful. And I think finding a niche market of being able to be a site management organization for pharmaceutical companies, probably one of the first in Canada, was something that was unheard of. And it happened to be something that I knew how to do very well because I knew while I didn't know everything about the brain at the time, I knew how to run a successful business. And that's something that my principal investigators didn't know how to do. They knew how to see patients, they knew how to run the trial, but they didn't know the business of the trial. And I handled that for them.
- [15:59]
Jordan Peterson
And when did you start that business?
- [16:02]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
I started in 2005.
- [16:05]
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- [17:36]
Jordan Peterson
Expressvpn.com jordan today 2005. So, okay, so by the time you had. By the time you won your elect, won your seat, you run a successful business, a successful and growing business. For 10 years.
- [17:48]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
For about 10 years.
- [17:49]
Jordan Peterson
How successful did it become?
- [17:52]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Oh, it was. It was actually pretty good, not to boast, but I won the Black Business and Professional Association Harry Jo Maroor Award for Young Entrepreneur, and in 2012, won the Toronto Board of Trade Entrepreneur of the Year Award with the company. It grew quite successfully to the point where I was running or co chairing with the Public Health Agency of Canada National Epidemiology Studies. So I think the success may have been measured in sort of dollars and cents, but I think the impact that I had within the industry, focusing on research, focusing on a market where oftentimes you don't see people like me running. You don't see, you know, women in that particular field. I was doing it and doing it successfully and having impact, not just for the physicians that I work with, but for the. The patients that we serve that were walking through the door.
- [18:47]
Jordan Peterson
So what did you do with your business once you ran for office?
- [18:52]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah.
- [18:52]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [18:53]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
So as parliamentary secretary to a prime minister, you have to. Well, some of us had to divest. Some of us didn't divest from everything, but I was naive enough to follow the rules, and I divested from the orc, from the company, and really had to start from scratch once I left politics again.
- [19:12]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, well, let's. Let's dive into that then. So tell me. Tell me the story of your experience as Parliamentary secretary and tell everyone what you learned and what happened. How long, how long were you, how long did you serve under Trudeau in the government?
- [19:31]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Four years. Not even four years because in March of 2019, I stepped out of the Liberal fold and sat as an independent. Towards the end, even though I had a few months left, I stepped down. But for about three and a half years, I stayed within the Liberal fold.
- [19:50]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, well, then why don't you just start at the beginning? Just start at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.
- [19:57]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah, so, I mean, It's a very interesting story because at the beginning, of course, I think with a lot of Canadians, we had a majority went from, you know, a couple dozen seats in the legislature to over 180 seats, a majority government. There was a lot of excitement, very much sunny ways, really excited about having that change of government within Canada. And it was an exciting time. It was exciting time to be appointed Parliamentary Secretary. It was an exciting time to be a member of Parliament. I knew I'd be able to represent the people that I serve very well. But of course, being a business person, I wanted to also make sure that I was holding myself accountable. So as Parliamentary secretaries, as we've discussed before, I really wanted to make sure we had a national brain strategy because I knew the research. For every dollar you invest in brain research, you get a $4 return, either with savings of people's lives, helping people to be able to return to work. Often caregivers, there was a 4 to 1 return. So I really wanted a national brain strategy and I wanted to take care of the people I knew were hurting the most, often women who are caregivers for people who are really struggling with neurological diseases or neurodegenerative conditions. So that for me was critically important. I drew up the plans with timelines and milestones and accountability metrics. I presented this framework in on, I think, January of 2016, really hoping that it will work out. And I heard nothing for a little while.
- [21:33]
Jordan Peterson
Presented it to who?
- [21:35]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
I presented it to pmo. So within the Prime Minister's office, his chief counsel would have been Jerry Butz and Katie Telford at the time. So I presented it to them. And to be honest, I'm not quite sure if the Prime Minister ever saw it. So I can't be certain of that. Although I was his parliamentary secretary, there was very, very little interaction, which people might think. I thought you said if he goes left, you go right. Well, that is normally the case, but there wasn't a lot of interaction with the Prime Minister at the time. And, you know, right from the beginning, I thought, this is awfully strange for me to have very little interaction. If you are able to witness Canadian politics or any political system, you'll see that there is a question period. Here we have a House of Commons in which we debate materials at question period. We get up and we answer questions to the Canadian public, to our, our counterparts on the, on the, the official opposition on the other side. And I was told that I was not allowed to speak during question period, which I also found quite strange. I Wasn't allowed to speak to media. And it just started rubbing me the wrong way. And so I just continued because I'm new and for, for people who are listening. And I. I'm not sure if this is going to bear weight, but to me, it bear a lot of weight knowing that during the 42nd Parliament, between 2015 and 2019, I was the only Black female elected in the 42nd Canadian Parliament. So with that understanding, I kind of kept myself very straight and narrow. I wasn't going to complain too much. I wasn't going to make too much noise about things because I was the only one there. And I didn't want to ruffle feathers. But as it kept going, I kept thinking something is just not right. I was invited to, of course, you get a new government invited to the White House State dinner, which was very exciting, I thought last year of the Obama administration. But I wasn't invited to dinner. I was just invited to go. And that rubbed me the wrong way and a number of different things that happened on that trip. The second time that I was invited to attend anything that the. On behalf of the Prime Minister was the opening of the National African American Museum in Washington. And that was exciting. You know, I was sitting behind Oprah. I mean, who wouldn't love that, right? But it was still. There was something that was not right. And then the last event. So I was invited to three international events, again for your listeners, as a parliamentary secretary to a minister. I am parliamentary secretary to the first minister, the Prime Minister. If he goes left, you go right. And if you can remember that 2016 term, the first term of just Montreaux, he was doing a lot of international travel. He was doing a lot of across country, across the world. I had three international trips. The last one was the inauguration of President Akufo Addo in Ghana. And when I was invited to that, I started to do the mental math in my head where I was invited to the state dinner but not invited to eat. I was invited to the African American Museum and I was invited to Ghana. Three events that were really black focused. And at that point I said, yeah, I'm done. And I resigned as parliamentary secretary.
- [25:29]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, let's walk through that. Let's walk through that. Let's go back to 2015. So Justin Trudeau was invited by the mavens of the Liberal Party at the end of the. Correct me if I've got any of this wrong, by the way. At the end of the end of the Harper term. Harper had been running the country for a substantial Period of time. And it's pretty typical for Canadians to throw out whoever's in charge on about a 10 year basis. And so many Canadians felt that it was time for change and the Liberal Party was in some degree of disarray and the powers that be went to Justin Trudeau. And I had some real trouble with that right at the beginning. I'd like your opinion about that. I'm not a fan of Mr. Trudeau, and so I may have a very biased perspective, but I'd like to at least be accurate in my suppositions. My sense was that he had no right to put himself forward in a fundamental ethical sense. He had no right. He did as a Canadian, obviously, because the only thing that Justin had going for him, apart from his attractiveness and his charm, which are both obvious, I would say he had an extremely famous name. And. But I didn't think that he had the experience or the education to dare to take on a role like that. And then I, you know, I was, I was thinking, well, that's a bit harsh because the Liberals did want someone who had name brand recognition and fair enough, and he could have come to office and surrounded himself with real experts and learned like mad carefully and perhaps had he had the ability, became a stellar leader over some period of time, although I didn't see much evidence of that either. So. And then he came out with this Sunny Ways campaign, and I think that really did capitalize on his charm and very effectively. And there was an optimistic mood in Canada at that point with regard to the possibilities of the new leadership. So you were also swept up and that was reminiscent to me. I was quite young when his father first came to power. But there was a wave of Trudeau mania across the country because Pierre Trudeau senior obviously was very charismatic and had that celebrity like effect on the Canadian public that his son did. Okay, so now that's 2015 and Trudeau comes to power and everybody's looking forward to having that happen. That's when you become Parliamentary secretary. Now, you had a, let's say, a detailed plan for something that was quite practical and quite novel on the neuroscience side, let's say. And you produced a plan and you put it forward to Jerry Butz and you mentioned someone else at that point, Katie Telford. Right, right. And as far as you could tell, that was rejected out of hand and you don't believe perhaps that it even got to Trudeau's desk. And although you were Parliamentary secretary, you didn't have a close relationship with him. And so apparently you weren't even in a position to ask him whether or not he had seen this plan that you had spent some time detailing. Now, I think it would be useful to outline for us what the role of a parliamentary secretary is and what it was that you expected that didn't happen and whether or not your expectations were actually realistic. Like, and you said, you know, you were disinclined to complain and you laid out the reasons for that. So what's the typical, as far as you understand, how are the relations between a Prime minister and his parliamentary secretary generally managed and what is that role generally?
- [29:08]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
So typically what happens, and you could check the record because I attempt not to say things that are not, that don't have receipts, is that a parliamentary secretary, especially to the Prime Minister, is sworn into privy council and has access to a breadth and depth of information that allows them to carry out their, their duties in a way that is fundamental to being able to have these meetings with individuals that are on high level or high level securities. Although I had the security screenings from cra, rcmp, csis, that was all done, but wasn't able to have those meetings. Now when I looked at other relationships with the Finance Minister, Bill Morneau and Francois Philippe Champagne, who was his parliamentary secretary, very close, very much, constantly having conversations, constantly involved in the policy development, constantly involved in stakeholder engagement and relationships. So there is a, there is a, there's no gaps between what that minister is doing and what that parliamentary secretary is doing. There has to be a tight relationship. And as a first minister, as par, as prime minister with the parliamentary secretary, there has to be an even tighter gap because if there's any kind of ripples or spaces in between the other ministries, we need to be aware of that. We need to run a tight ship. We have a lot to do on the agenda. So making sure that you have someone that's not only competent but has their ears to the ground, they know what is happening, is what I thought would be the relationship that I had. And I would say that maybe I don't want to mislead anyone. Maybe it was my fault that that relationship didn't go as well. The first meeting that I had with the Prime Minister was in December of 5th, 2015. And of course everybody remembers that during that first administration he had a 50, 50 cabinet. And he came out and said, you know, that this is the cabinet because it's 2015, not because the people had merit, not because, you know, I have an excellent lineup. He said, it's because it's 2015, it was very disenfranchising. And I think it was very much flippant for someone who was a leader of a G7 country to just say, because it's 2015. Okay, let me dive into that.
- [31:33]
Jordan Peterson
Let me dive into that just for a sec, if you don't mind. Well, because that also struck me. That struck me really hard. You know, I spent a lot of time assessing the research literature on hiring and determining how you do that. If you hire purely on merit, let's say, and merit is defined in relationship to the evidence you have that the people you're attempting to hire actually have the ability to do what that specific job requires. And there are various ways of determining that merit. You do a job analysis to find out what the job actually entails, and then you go through the person's history and you see if they have the experience and the raw ability. Okay, so now when Trudeau announced that 5050 cabinet.
- [32:16]
C
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- [33:21]
Jordan Peterson
That's vanta.comjordan for $1,000 off because it was 2015. I thought something quite similar to what you thought. I thought first, hey, that's pretty damn flippant. And I thought, second, you've done something there that's really not good because only 25% of the members of the House of Commons were female. And that means you've reduced your applicant pool a priori by half. And so there's no way that you pulled the Most statistically speaking, purely. There's no possible way that you screened and pulled in the most qualified people into your Cabinet, and you did that for show. And so. Well, if you cut your applicant pool by half on arbitrary grounds, there might be other reasons to select people. But. But. Okay, but you had reasons as well. They might not have been the same I did. You had reasons for being irritated by that. So delve more for me, if you would, into why. It put your teeth on edge, certainly.
- [34:18]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
And I won't speak to sort of the skills of the individuals. I think he had a very competent Cabinet around him. The thing that really struck me with the. Because it was. Because it's 2015, is because it was so flippant, because it was. So it made it seem like it was arbitrary, and it made it seem, as you said, for show. And so I went into that meeting saying to him that, look, I understand what my role here, I understand I'm the only one that looks like me. But what I said, and I quote, is, if I'm here to fill any gender or racial gap within your Cabinet, I don't want this role.
- [35:01]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, I'm not about that. Dangers. That. That is absolutely. One of the dangers of gender and ethnicity selection, let's say, is that you, like, I saw this at the universities all the time. I think it's a terrible. It's a terrible thing to have happen around people who are from a minority background who are truly qualified, because it's hard on them because they don't know why they're selected, and it's hard on everybody else because they don't know why they're selected. And so that's not fun.
- [35:30]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
It's not fun. And putting that forward, right at the beginning, I wanted to put him on notice that I am smart, I'm more than capable. So use me for a particular role that you might have within this. This position as Parliamentary Secretary. But don't for a second think that I would be a token throughout your entire administration. That was the notice that I was putting him under with saying those words. And so after I said that, he said, you know what, Selena? Do you trust my judgment? Dude, I met you like five minutes ago. So I said, no, I don't trust your judgment. I have no. I have no reason to. I've been married to my. My partner for 17 years. I hardly trust his judgment most days. But, I mean, I have to build a relationship with someone. I'm not going to lie to you and say that I trust your judgment. And I realized at that moment that the tension in the room got a little awkward and why. It's only.
- [36:34]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, let's take that apart. Because. Okay, so.
- [36:36]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah, let's take that apart.
- [36:38]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, I'm doing my.
- [36:39]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
On this.
- [36:40]
Jordan Peterson
Well, for sure. So, look, you. You had some reason to be apprehensive. Two reasons, right. The first reason you lined out, one is because of the statements that Trudeau made about the composition of his Cabinet and how he made that. And then second, because you were the only black woman in the entire House of Commons, and so the combination of those two things made it reasonable for you to wonder just what was going on and to make a statement. Now, if I was going to play the devil's advocate, I'd say, you know, maybe. And I'm not saying that this is right, but I. Because I really do want to go into this, so I want to do it in the most in the harshest way possible. So we get it straight. You know, you might say, and I think you kind of alluded to this, given that you said that perhaps you put your foot forward wrong the first meeting. You know, you might say, if you were thinking about it strategically, you would have had a calm and somewhat contentless first meeting and just got to know each other a little bit before you put your foot down, so to speak, about the role you were going to play. But maybe not too. Maybe the right thing to do was to make your case right off the bat. There's no way I can tell. But you said that. But you were inclined to do that, and then you said that when you did it, the atmosphere in the room wasn't perhaps what you might have hoped for. So. So tell me what you saw. And he asked you to trust him, which is also. That's something you remember, and it isn't. It is a. It's a. It's a. It's an event worthy of note. Because the question is, what did he mean? Because you don't know him now, did he mean you should just trust him because he's Justin Trudeau and he's the Prime Minister of Canada? Or did he mean that you should start out by trusting someone if you're employed by them in a new role? Like, I don't know, what did you think?
- [38:29]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah, you know what? I'm not even sure that question is warranted on the first day. Like, do you trust my judgment on the first day? I mean, I know that your platform was built by a number of different people. It wasn't just you. Why are you even asking that? Question. And why are you asking that question of me? Do you think we could work together? Do you think we could achieve the objectives of our platform? Do you think that we're going to do right by Canadians with this particular mandate? Ask me those questions. I don't really care about your particular mandate. And it really speaks to ego and it really speaks to a particular sense of awareness or lack thereof. That was pretty evident right from the beginning. And if we think about this whole episode, me being in politics has driven me into the PhD work that I'm doing right now on motivated cognition and understanding what motivates people, their self appraisal, their self enhancement, their self verification. It was really in that moment, seeing that everything that needed to align for Justin Trudeau at that moment needed to feed into his feelings or his motivation on self, what he felt about himself. And I came in and within that first 15 minutes of a meeting said, no, I'm not just going to arbitrarily fall into what you deem to be your methodology around your self enhancement. That is not my role. My role is to represent the people of Rigby. My role is to make sure that we execute a mandate. And I didn't know that at the time, but it really spoke to fact. Didn't know what I didn't know at the time that probably that that wasn't the best move to make because I assumed that Addis's parliamentary secretary as his right hand person, that he would have wanted someone who was going to be honest. And I don't think that's what he wanted. He wanted someone to confirm a bias that he felt about himself or a lack of self esteem that he felt about himself by saying, yes, I trust your judgment, Justin, I don't know you, but I'm going to say I could play that game. I didn't want to.
- [40:47]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so. Okay, so that's what, that's what alerted you, let's say, is that you, if I got, tell me if I've got this right, you felt that his query about whether or not you trusted him was an attempt to insist that you, on no evidence because you didn't know him, make the presumption that he was competent and that he would lead your relationship in the appropriate direction. Now you laid out a bunch of other questions that he could have asked you which were more other focused. Right. They were more focused on service to Canadians. Now you read a lot into that. I mean, which you just laid out. You, it sounds to me like you were surprised. Let's say that the conversation became about him. And it sounds to me that you weren't disabused of that suspicion as things progressed. Now, you've also laid out for us already the fact that you were trotted out, so to speak, at three international events, and they were all international events that you associated with you being put on display as a consequence of your ethnicity and perhaps your gender. Is that a reasonable. Is that a reasonable representation?
- [42:05]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
That's reasonable. Okay, now it's not a reasonable representation. It is what happened?
- [42:10]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, fine, fine. I just want to make sure that I'm not misrepresenting this. Okay, now. And so what happened to you was that you didn't establish a working relationship on a day to day basis with the man you were supposed to be walking arm in arm with, let's say, and you would have expected as Parliamentary Secretary, given that it was a key role, that you'd be in constant communication. How often did you in fact speak with Prime Minister Trudeau?
- [42:37]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
I would say it was a handful of times. I haven't. I didn't count it. But it wasn't. And it was a handful of times and of very little substance. There wasn't. We didn't have any substantial meetings where we were talking about policy or anything else. It was kind of in passing. Yes.
- [42:55]
Jordan Peterson
So you didn't have any meetings that were substantive. How long was the first meeting?
- [42:59]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Not the first meeting was maybe about half an hour. You know what? I should. I stand corrected. The other meeting that I had with the Prime Minister was in August of 2016. And in August of 2016, I brought to him a couple of things. And I remember this because I didn't have another meeting until. I didn't hear anything about it until 2018. So in August of 2016, I came to him and I said at the time, the United nations had declared the International Decade of people of African descent between 2014 and 2024. We were two years in. I brought that to the Prime Minister. I said, look, we should probably recognize this. The UN has brought it forward. I think it would be a good idea. He said to me, selena, what do you want to do? I said, that's not up to me to decide what I should do. For all Canadians of African descent. That's unfair. We should actually do this properly, understand some of the concerns, understand some of the issues that they're having, and then actually recognize this international decade in a way that makes sense, in a way that is actually genuine to our mission and mandate as a government. And so that meeting ended and I Didn't hear anything for a year. And then on January 31st of 2018, I was invited to the foyer of the House of Commons and again paraded in front Selena, you have to be there on this day. And I'm saying, like, what's going on? And he comes out and I hear that we're announcing the international recognition, Canada's recognition of the International Decade of People of African Descent. And my heart breaks because I realize then I start doing my homework, and I realize that over the last year, there have been dozens of meetings about this issue that I have been purposely not invited to. And I. And again. And I'm not trying to make an excuse for bad behavior, but I understand the person that I am. I'm a person who will fight for and advocate for people that I know don't have the privileges that I have, that don't have the luxuries that I have. I understand the power that I have as someone who could be elected or someone who has the ear of the prime minister at the same time, to be so disenfranchised from an individual, because I am outspoken, because I advocate, because I put the people that I serve ahead of me, because I'm not willing to just take some garbage that you decide to put forward as policy and not interrogate it. That is not my role. It is not my job. And from that moment, I knew that within that particular party, within that system, I actually thought that staying in there would have killed me before it actually did anything else. It made me really feel like I had to become smaller and smaller, and it wasn't who I was.
- [46:26]
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- [47:47]
Jordan Peterson
Let'S, let's walk through this. Okay, so you got elected. That was quite unlikely. You had had a successful business career and you were in somewhat of a unique position in the House of Commons. And so you had every reason to assume that, well, that you had quite a stellar opportunity and a heavy responsibility in front of you. And you had a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau and it wasn't very long. And you said some things about the kind of role that you were hoping you'd play and the fact that you weren't particularly interested in playing a token role, let's say. And that didn't go in a stellar manner. And he made some reference to his own what would you say? Wishes in that regard. And then, and then from as far as I can tell, you were essentially sidelined. So let me ask you some questions. And then you said that the fact of that sidelining and the fact that it was done in a relatively, what would you say? In a manner that didn't really involve you in the least. It was done what I say. You're sidelined so effectively that you're not even involved in the fact of your own isolation. And so you said that had relatively severe psychological consequences for you. You just alluded to that, you know, and that you felt that you were being diminished. What with what, with regards to your, what is it exactly? Your confidence in your professional capacity. What effect did that have on you?
- [49:17]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
That's a good, that's a very good question because it in, in, in the initial, in the, in the outset, it did, it really diminished my confidence in myself. It really made me worry about whether or not I was good enough, I was worthy enough for the job. And, and to be honest, I want, I want to be very transparent with your listeners. During 2016, I had what is classically termed a nervous breakdown. I was institutionalized for four days. My depression was absolutely the worst it has ever been. It was very hard. However, what that announcement in 2018 did on January 30, parading me out to be at an announcement where you have intentionally sidelined me for over a year, it did something to my confidence that I don't quite know how to explain, and I'm not sure it did something to my confidence, it did something to my resolve to really start to use this role to advocate for people. And I said to my partner at the time, I said, the gloves are coming off. They're going to get rid of me either way. I might as well go out, you know, if they're going to talk about me anyway, I might as well give them something to talk about.
- [50:46]
Jordan Peterson
And so, so let, let, let me, let me walk through, let me walk through that. Okay, so, because I, I, well, it's, it's a complicated story. I mean, so what you've told, what you've told us so far is that you spent 10 years building up a bit an unlikely business. And so that's a difficult matter, and that's a real indication of competence because you're working at the intersection of two diverse fields and no one else is doing it. And you manage to build it from scratch and make it successful. So that's hard and unlikely. And then it goes for 10 years, so you're able to sustain that. Then you ran for office and you won, which was unlikely, and then you had to sideline your business, right? So that's a big deal. So, like, you, you, you, you sacrificed a lot in order to take that position. And then you get a pretty decent promotion right off the bat, right? And so then you're thinking something like, well, this is going pretty well and look at all the opportunities in front of me. And then all of a sudden you find that that's all for show and that the real activity has nothing to do with you at all and you're not included in the discussions at all. And so, okay, and so I'm curious, okay, so I'm curious about the effect of that as far as these are very personal questions, so forgive me, but this is important because it's actually key to why I was interested in talking to you to begin with, because I knew something like this had happened and I wanted to find out what it was. Okay, so now that had quite a devastating effect on you, right? That's, that's what you laid out now. And so what, what was that? Was that, was that disappointment in the fact that you had strived very hard to make yourself an entirely credible and able person and that the opportunities that that sort of person would have had, in fact presented themselves to you, but then proved to be illusory because someone was playing a public relations game. Like, is that what's going on. Is that what you discovered or is there something about that I've got wrong?
- [52:46]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah, no, I think you got it absolutely right. I think that the, and again, looking at the literature around this post appointment, looking at, you know, how tokenism can be very disenfranchising, how it could be very dehumanizing at the, at the time, for me, I just couldn't reconcile in my head the fact that I knew I was smart, the fact that I knew I could do this job, the fact that I knew if he put me in front of any audience anywhere at any time, I'd read my briefs, I learned French in a matter of months. Like, this is not an easy role for someone who is hypervisible. I am hyper visible. If I do not show up one day, you're going to scan the room and go, where's the black girl at? Like you're going to know I'm not there. So I have to be 100% on my game all the time. And I couldn't reconcile the fact that I am 100% ready for this. I'm not allowed to speak to media, I'm not allowed to speak in the house, I'm not being sent anywhere. And how does, what kind of trick does that play on your mind? How does that, if we want to call it social identity threat or we want to call it any other of the terms that we use in cognitive research, what does that do to the mind of a person when they know that the only thing that they're there for is like, oh my God, look at this, I'm black. And oh my God, look at these, I'm a woman.
- [54:21]
Jordan Peterson
It's actually worse than that, I think, I think it's worse than that psychologically because you're actually put in a really hard place. So because there's an element here that we haven't explored, you see, because you had to make a choice when you were evaluating what happened to you. So one of the things you could have thought and should have thought if you were reasonably self critical was maybe you got off on the wrong foot, you know, and set yourself up for that. Now we already went through that, so I won't.
- [54:46]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Sure.
- [54:47]
Jordan Peterson
So I won't. You know, you want to assess whatever role you had in the failure of this relationship to get kindled. But the other thing you had to understand here that, that, that is also a crisis of faith is that you're dealing with someone who's the elected leader of a major country now. He, he's either the real thing or he's not. And if he's not the real thing, that's a real problem if he's someone who's just acting out his role. And so now you're in a position where you have to decide whether there's something wrong with you, and there might be, who knows, Right. And that you're not up to scratch for the role and you're being sidelined because of your incompetence, or you have to decide that there's something seriously rotten behind the stage at what, at the Wonderful World of Oz. And whether the people pulling the strings behind the scenes are just not exactly who they should be. And if you already put faith in the Liberal Party, you said that you were entranced, at least to the same degree that other Canadians were, by the possibility that Justin Trudeau brought to the stage. Okay? So now you had two hard problems to deal with. Like, it's. There's either something seriously wrong with you or there's something not only seriously wrong with him, but with the whole bloody charade. And so it's not surprising that that would, like, pull you apart, because either one of those being true is not good.
- [56:06]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Either one of those being true is not good. And I felt that intimate intimately, for three years. And when I made the decision in September 2018 that I said, you know what? I am not dying here, it came to the point where I actually kept saying to myself, I am not dying here. This cognitive dissonance that exists internally compared to my external reality is so bizarre to me that when I started to question my own abilities, I mean, I know exactly what I'm capable of. I didn't get to parliamentary secretary of a prime minister as a woman, as a black woman, as whatever identity you want to call me, because I'm stupid. I didn't get there because I don't have grit. I didn't get there because I'm not tenacious. I got there because I have all those things and then some. And that's not being boastful or anything. That's just reality. You don't get to. How long did it take to navigate systems like that?
- [57:19]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so you had this crisis, you said, and it really, like, knocked you for a loop. How long did it take you to convince yourself that those things that you now know to be true? How long did it take yourself to convince. How long did it take you to convince yourself that you weren't the. What would you say you weren't the problem here, let's say? And how did you manage to Convince yourself of that. Well, that's a hard thing to do. And obviously you're going to have to do that to crawl out of the hole that you were in. What process did you go through to regain your confidence and then tell us what happened?
- [57:55]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
So let me go back to the by election because I told you I lost the by election, right? And I did the exact same thing that I did at the by election as I did in 2017. And I figured out why I lost. I figured I self awareness is a heck of a thing. You have to figure out how you got yourself into whatever position that you're in, not what Justin Trudeau did, not what anybody else did. What did you do, Selena, to lose that election or to get into this position where you're having such a hard time that you're hospitalized for four days? And so I really had to regain to shift my thinking and just remember actually who I was and remember the why I was there and the how I got there, which I think people often forget in these kinds of circumstances because they I could have stayed beating myself up and then exited politics and nobody would have been the wiser. But I remembered how I got there and why I was there. And both of those reasons had to do with the people that I served. I got there because the people that I served in Whitby elected me and put their faith in me. And I was there to make sure that I didn't let them down. And so with those two things in mind, I realized that my boss probably wasn't as the person that they thought was my boss, Trudeau, that wasn't my boss. My boss were the people of Whitby. And then with that switch in mind, it became very easy to not placate to the puppet master behind the wall at oz. It became very easy for me to stay true to the people that I served. And it wasn't him.
- [59:35]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so. Okay, so two questions then. We'll, we'll go in two directions from that. The first question is like, who is running the show as far as you're concerned, in the Trudeau government or who was then? And maybe it's Trudeau, but maybe it isn't. And so I'm curious about that. I mean, I've heard from other people that I've talked to that he is markedly absent in, during discussions of ideational significance. Let's say he's not particularly interested in policy. He's not interested in the details of governing. Now, I don't know that to be true. And so that's part of the reason I wanted to talk to you. And then I also want to know, once you realized who your actual. Who you were actually responsible to, you know, which is a very good realization. Right. In a democratic system to remember that. And I can understand perfectly well why you would have forgotten that, given the glamour and glitter around the. In the dawning days and your relative inexperience. Okay, so then once you came to that realization, what changed and how did you. What changed? What did you start doing differently and what happened? So let's do the first thing first. Who. Who is running the show or who was running the show as far as you're concerned? And what did that. What did that mean?
- [60:46]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah, so as far as running the show, I think most people would remember, Canadians will remember that when Harper. Harper was prime minister, that people kept saying that, you know, 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, Jerry Butz, Katie Telford, that were primarily running the show. And I don't think I'm the only one that would say this. I would think that Bill Morneau left, said the same thing. Others have left and said the same thing. So don't. This is not a selenaized perspective. This is something that I witnessed that I think is actually true when it comes to, you know, after the incident with Jody Wilson Raybould, when Jerry Butz stepped down, I thought he was the only adult in the room. And when he stepped down, it became very apparent that things were going to get a lot worse before it got a lot better. And we could talk about that later. What happened after. Yeah, what happened after I made that recognition was I did things completely differently and I got into. I still kept getting into a lot of trouble for things, but at this point, I was doing it for the right reasons. I'm getting in good trouble. And oftentimes you'd be given a speech and said, here, read the speech, say what's on the speech, and don't deviate. And I'd say, forget it. I'm not saying what's on this speech. This speech has nothing to do with the people of Whitby. It has nothing to do with the people that I serve. Tell me the three things that you want me to say that are really important. I'll say those, but I need to make sure that I'm representing Whitby. So I'd write my own speeches. I'd make sure I'd say them in French and English because I didn't want anybody to knock me for it. And I really made sure that I wasn't doing the cookie cutter politician moved where you'd see one person sends out a tweet and everybody's tweet looks exactly the same. That wasn't me. I was me. I was very clear to make sure that the people of Whitby knew that I was serving them. And if I couldn't tweak the messaging, I posted nothing. And then I think towards the end, but towards especially March of 2019, I just decided that I was not going to let the actions of one person dictate how I left government. And I was not going to let Justin Trudeau continue to be presenting himself as this sunny ways great politician when I knew that he was the emperor with no clothes on.
- [63:46]
D
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- [64:54]
Jordan Peterson
So what did you do about that? Like you had some famous blowups as you departed from the political scene. Now this is reminiscent you mentioned Bill Morneau and Judy Weiss and Rabel. So you're, you're, I mean part. Another of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you is because, you know, three establishes a pattern and there seems to be very close affinity and maybe I'm wrong about that, but from the outside close affinity between what happened with, with Morneau and what happened with Rabo and What happened with you? And that's three. And so maybe you could let everybody who's watching and listening know about these other people that departed and why you think that happened. And then also tell us when you decided to speak in your own voice again, given that you weren't given the opportunity to speak as the press secretary anyways. So tell me, tell us what happened with Bill Morneau and Judy Wilson. Rabo. And then also what happened to you when you started to reclaim your territory, let's say yes.
- [65:54]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah. So it didn't start with us, though. I want to be very clear. Leona Alicev left way before decorated military person who decided to leave and cross the floor to the Conservatives really early in our mandate because she was so disenfranchised with the Prime Ministers. Other people left after we left. Eva Nesef also left because of the bullying that she received within the party. So there was. There was a few people. So it's not just a three. By the time Jane Philpott, decorated medical professional, left. We were way beyond threes at that point. So.
- [66:32]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, yes.
- [66:33]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah. So there were quite a few. And I would say for me, I didn't have to have a public blowup with the Prime Minister when I told him that I was leaving in early March of 2019. I was very clear for all of the reasons that we discussed before. Feeling tokenized, not getting the support of the Prime Minister, just being very much marginalized within a Liberal, which makes me so. It's so upsetting because it's one thing to say you did some missteps, but I felt duped by a party that I really thought understood what it meant to be center, understood what it was, what it meant to have equity and justice, what it meant to have those things and to be disenfranchised by them because I wanted more for the people that I serve was disenfranchising for me. Yes, it was.
- [67:32]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [67:33]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
That is the word. Thank you very much. That is actually the word betrayal. And so I called the Prime Minister and I said, look, I'm not running again. I didn't even have to give him reason. I said, I'm not running again. It's four years. I'm not getting a pension, I'm not getting anything. I just don't want to do this first. He said, well, that was the same day that Jody Wilson Raybould had stepped down. He couldn't have. He couldn't have two women of color leave at the same day.
- [68:04]
Jordan Peterson
That's what he told you. Really?
- [68:08]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Like, dude, that's not my problem.
- [68:09]
Jordan Peterson
That was his first response to your yes, okay, so that. So, no, I'm going to play psychologist here for a minute, okay? Because that's really not. That's seriously not. That's seriously not good. Right? Because if he was a wise man and if he was a mature man, he would have understood that you. You divested yourself of your business, your life took quite a turn, and that even if you two didn't get along, the fact that you'd been in government for only four years and you were leaving without running for reelection, without a pension, meant you were going back to square one in many ways. And so the first thing he should have said, even if he would have been somewhat truly self aware and still putting his own interests first, he should have at least had the bloody sense to act as if he cared about what you were telling him. The fact that his first response was, I'm dead serious about that. Like, even if he was faking it, you know, if. Even if he was a wise faker, the first thing he should have done was said like something like, well, you know, I know we've had our differences. I really appreciate your service. You put an awful lot of on the line for this. It's really unfortunate didn't work out. Is there anything I can do for you to make your departure more straightforward? Straightforward? I wish we could have worked together more sincerely. Right. Definitely. Definitely. And then if he was a genuine human being, so to speak, that would have actually bothered him. But the fact that he came out and said, I can't afford to have two women of color leave me the first the same day, like all that means is that every single thing that you regarded was as a betrayal was in fact a betrayal. Absolutely. That's absolutely inexcusable.
- [69:53]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
But wait, there's more. That's not all he said. That was the first thing he said. So I said, you know, Justin, perhaps if not today or tomorrow or at some point in the future, you'll understand the level of sacrifice that I've made to be in this role. And I repeated it again, not today or tomorrow, but someday, I hope you understand the level of sacrifice. And then he was not happy with that. He said, oh, my God. Oh my God, Selena, I can't believe that you're talking about my privilege. I was like, what? What he said, you know, he started talking about the fact that he has, you know, Had. Had death threats too. And that. And in my mind I'm going, but you have an RCMP detail. When me and My kids had death threats. I didn't have anybody. Right. Like, so there's a lot of stuff missing from this story, Jordan, that, like, that you're not. I'm not putting out. But he went on and on and how I needed to appreciate him because he came to the writing during the by election and how I should be, you know, grateful to him. And I just was like, oh, hell no. And I said a few choice words to him after that because I, I lost it at that point and. Yeah.
- [71:30]
Jordan Peterson
What did you say?
- [71:31]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
The point of me? Oh, I said bad.
- [71:35]
Jordan Peterson
Well, you can tone it down. What. What were you conveying? Put it that way.
- [71:42]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
I was conveying that I wanted him to know. Who did he think he was speaking to? Like, I'm not a child. I'm not someone that he could just reprimand. I'm not. I'm a colleague. And as a person in a professional capacity, if he had went off the way he did with me on someone else, he would have been taken straight to hr. And that doesn't happen because he has parliamentary privilege. And so he's able to get away with those kinds of things. And I wanted to make him darn sure that he was not going to get away with it with me. And I knew that he called on the Prime Minister's line and so I know that whatever I'm saying that happened in this exchange is recorded somewhere. So I told him, absolutely not. You are never going to speak to me like that again. At the same time, though, Jordan, that would have stayed completely quiet. I would have never mentioned that I had that phone call with the Prime Minister ever, until the issue with Jody Wilson Raybould came up and go through that. Yes. And so Jody Wilson Raybould, for the, for those who don't know, was the first Indigenous Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. Decorated lawyer, really, really, really admirable, smart person, when you talk about merit, absolutely has the merit for the job. Now, whether or not you like what she did within the context of this situation is irrelevant to me. The fact that the Prime Minister's officer office pressured her to do something that she knew would get her possibly disbarred and that the Ethics Commissioner found the Prime Minister in breach of and actually wrong for pressuring her to allow this company to pressure her in doing something with this company is quite telling. So she was actually in the right by not taking the pressure or advice of the Prime Minister. But that's not the point. The point is that after this all happened with Jody, Jody stepped Down. She was being pressured to do something that she knew was unethical, was wrong by legal standards. She said she wasn't going to do it. She was demoted first. Then she stepped down as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, and then she was thrown out of the party. Her and Jane Philpott. Jane Philpott, again, decorated medical doctor who was the Minister of Health, the president of the Treasury Board, and another ministry within our government. The Prime Minister after that decided that he was going to go on national television and apologize to Canadians for the kerfuffle that was happening within his government. And he said the words of. And I'm going to misquote here, so we could look up the words at some point. But he said, I want Canadians to know that my office door is open and it is available for anyone to come in, and that I treat everyone with basically kindness and respect in sunny ways. And I listened to that, and I said, absolutely not. I had the first phone call with him in which he raked me over the coals for not appreciating him, although I had sacrificed just as much as he did and did exactly what he did to get into his position. I ran. I was elected. He just had a different title. We both worked hard, but I needed to appreciate him, for whatever reason, raked me over the coals for that. And then the second time I went to him, I went after that meeting and I said I was going to go to him and say, look, you know what? We both said things we didn't mean on that phone call. Let's try to.
- [76:00]
Jordan Peterson
This is the last adult you described.
- [76:03]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
That's correct. The last phone call. I went to him after that, and just like I'm sitting across from you now, said, let's be adults here. We said some things we didn't mean. Let's move it along. The. The. The level of contempt and almost hatred that he approached me with. I was. I have never felt more scared in my life of someone to be in a room with someone. And I knew that that happened.
- [76:38]
Jordan Peterson
Wounded narcissism.
- [76:42]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Oh, no, I have not.
- [76:43]
Jordan Peterson
Rings a bell.
- [76:44]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
No.
- [76:45]
Jordan Peterson
Well, beware of it. Seriously. So. Okay, so that's a very. That's a hell of a thing to say. Seriously. That's. That's quite a thing to say.
- [76:54]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Yeah.
- [76:55]
Jordan Peterson
That you were afraid. Okay, so I want to know.
- [76:57]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
I was.
- [76:58]
Jordan Peterson
Why were you afraid? That's just. Yes, because that's. Look, that's. That's a whole different level of anything that you've revealed so far. Right. The worst thing that you've really revealed so far is the last conversation that you had with him where you both lost your temper and exchanged some harsh words. Right. And there was all this strangeness surrounding Rabo and, and Morneau at that time, too. But now you go there in an attempt to. What would you say? I wouldn't say smoke over the waters, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.
- [77:29]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Put some putty on it or something.
- [77:31]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right. Well, and I mean, people get upset and they say things that are emotional, and then they can have a calm discussion about it and set things moderately right so they can go ahead. But you said, you said that there was a terrible tension in the room that you associated with both contempt and. That's not good. Contempt is a very, very dangerous emotion. So married couples going for counseling who roll their eyes at one another have about a 99% chance of being divorced in the next year. Contempt is not good. And contempt plus hatred, that's seriously not good. And contempt, hatred plus fear in the target, that's really not good. Okay, so now tell me exactly what transpired in that meeting and why you had that reaction.
- [78:19]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
There was nothing that. There was no words. It was a glare. It was this reddening of the face. It was this. The exhalation of his voice. And I stood there and I was alone in the room because it was after caucus. I didn't want anybody else to know that, to hear the conversation. So I waited in line because after caucus meetings, everybody goes up and wants him to sign stuff and talk and blah, blah, blah. I waited till the end. There was nobody else in the room. And this exchange happened with. And I said, you know what, Justin? I'm really. And I was stopped in my tracks with the glare, the Huffington. And then he got up out of his seat and he just like stormed out of the room. And I froze because at that moment I knew that this person actually could make or break the rest of my life. And I was petrified of what could happen next, how it could happen, what I didn't know what he would do. Right. You have a name like Trudeau and you decide to blacklist Selena from ever working in Canada again, that could happen like that. It's me versus him. And I realized I had no ground to stand on. And so I went back to the chamber. I sat there for a little while and I just petrified. I didn't know what to do. He came in just before, and this was witnessed by everybody in the House of Commons. He came in I was sitting down at my seat. He came in, crouched behind me and said. Not even an attempt to say, hey, get a page. Get Selena into the back room. I have something to say to her. Not come and stand in front of me, crouched behind me and said, hey, I'm sorry. And I turned around and I'm like, I. There were no words to express that kind of cowardice. There was no words to express how I don't. I don't even know what to. I don't know what words to put on that behavior because I just got up and I left and I could not. I couldn't. It was one of the lowest points for me. I went immediately, I called my psychiatrist and I said, I think I'm going to have another breakdown. Like, I need. I need a session. I need. Like I'm in trouble. I'm actually in trouble here. And even talking about it now, I. I just wish I was stronger. I just wish I didn't let someone bully me.
- [81:23]
Jordan Peterson
Understand, you have to understand that way that this wasn't. This is not only your response to a personal situation. You have to keep. You have to take that in mind when you're. Keep that in mind when you're assessing your own emotional response. Like at one level you're having a very unpleasant conversation with another person. At another level, you are having a rough time with the leader of a.
- [81:47]
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- [83:06]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Right.
- [83:06]
Jordan Peterson
So. So, you know, you. I wouldn't, I wouldn't go out of my way to question your emotional reaction. You know, I don't think that your response, saying that, no, no, I don't think so. I know. I don't think so. I think that there's. There's more. There's many more things happening here than the merely personal. And, you know, you're asking yourself to respond without devastating emotion to a situation that's bearing at least three dimensions of severe and unexpected stress on you simultaneously. That's a lot. I think it's too much to ask. I think it's too much to ask, really. So if it was just, it was just a colleague, if it was just, you know, if it was just a colleague or even just an employer, that's one thing. But you didn't just have a colleague or an employer. You were having an exchange with a man who has an incredibly powerful familial name and who's the prime minister of a country, a big country. Right. So, yeah. So it's not surprising to me that you had the response that you had, just for whatever that's worth. So let me ask you a question about this story, too. You know, one of the things that really struck me, and that is indicative of something seriously rotten in Canada, and I mean seriously rotten, is that these six people that you described as fleeing the ship, let's say, for similar reasons, and many of them, perhaps all of them stellar people, have you had an opportunity to sit down with anybody from the legacy media in Canada, the radically government subsidized legacy media, I might add, and actually have a chance to you walk through what happened, because you'd think that the media would be interested in this if it only happened once. Well, you ignore it three times. I said, that's the pattern. You said, it's not three, Dr. Peterson, it's not three, it's six or more. So to what degree has this pattern been communicated, this pattern of interaction between Trudeau and his people being communicated by the legacy media in Canada?
- [85:24]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
So let me just close the loop on this story because I want to say how it ended, and then I'll go into media. How it ends is. So he goes in, he gives this big apology, tells people that he has this open office, that he's welcoming and nice to everybody, and at that moment I'm thinking in my head, I'm at home. I am having, like, the worst few days ever. And I'm holding my phone and I start to type. That is absolutely not true. Do you remember our last two interactions? And I pause before I send send on the. On the Twitter message because I know the feeling that I had in that last meeting. I know that he could make or break whatever happens to me after. And I start to press send, and I'm like, no way. There's no way I could do this, because I will never work another day in Canada again. And then I also think to myself, if I don't press send and I allow this person to just get away with this behavior, I will never be able to look myself in the mirror. I'll never be able to look my daughters in the face. I'll never be able to look my son in the face. And so I press send, and I say to myself, that's it. I'm done. And which brings us to your next question around the media, which is a really valid one.
- [86:59]
Jordan Peterson
Was that the right choice? Was that the right choice that you made? And why?
- [87:04]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Because it may not have been the right.
- [87:06]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, you said you had the practical reality of your life on the one hand. And what, what, what? It's. It's not exactly self esteem. It's. I don't know exactly how to characterize it. You characterized it in relationship to your children. Right. You said that if you didn't push send that you, what, you would have failed to be the sort of person that they needed you to be. It's something like that.
- [87:28]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Well, well, it would have been. It. Would it not necessarily that I wouldn't have been able to look myself in the mirror. Because it means that because you hold the name Trudeau that you're. That you are above somebody standing up to you. You're above, you know, me standing up for someone that I know is Jody Wilson Raybould, who I know did the right thing. I'm just going to stay quiet because your name is Trudeau and you could do something to me. Absolutely not. I have rebounded. I have survived a lot more worse evident things. Events than that. So I could rebound. But was it the right decision? To be honest with you, for a year after leaving politics, I could not find a job. I applied and applied and applied and could not. And that's not to say woe is me or anything, but just the reality of the situation. Because I'd call up some of my colleagues, like Roger Kuzner, I called Roger. I said, roger, what are you doing now? He said, oh, I'm working. I said, oh, well, where'd you apply? He said, you don't apply, Selena, if you're in government. They just scoop you up in a GR firm. And I thought, oh, okay, right again.
- [88:47]
Jordan Peterson
I think the point.
- [88:49]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
No, no scooping. No scooping here. But I think the point of it is that if you're not willing to stand for something, and this is where it really came to head for me, if you're not willing to stand for something, you'll fall for anything. And I didn't. It didn't matter to me that his name was Trudeau. It didn't matter. What mattered was that you are railroading an individual life or hater. I do not care how you feel about Jodi Wilson Raybould. What happened to her was wrong and she needed people on her side that would say, you're absolutely right. What I found very interesting was that, you know, we'd have gone through a MeToo movement during that government, those four years, and every one of my colleagues. Trudeau. Hashtag MeToo. Believe her when she says she's bullied. Believe her with this. Believe her when that. I found it was so interesting to believe her when it was convenient and leave Jody when it was not. And I was not about to leave her for anybody. I didn't care what his name was. And so it wasn't necessarily to me about whether or not I'd work in Canada again. It would be. It was whether or not I'd be able to look myself in the eye and look my kids in the eye and say I did the right thing, even when I knew it was the hardest thing to do. And I'll end this part with this. I don't know if you've read Clayton Christensen's essay, How Will youl Measure your Life? And for your readers, your listeners, read this article. It talks about, you know, your ability to stand by your values and principles. He says, stand by your principles not 100% of the time. If you stand by your values and principle 98% of the time, you'll regret where you end up because you're doing a marginal cost analysis. You know, if I. If I cheat just this one time, if I don't stand up my. Or my friend, just one time, it's fine. No, it's not. You either do it 100% of the time or you don't do it at all. And for me, it was the 100% or not at all. And at this point, I was so far gone. I had experienced all that I experienced and I stayed very, very quiet. But on this issue, it was beholden for me to stand up because that was the opportunity that I had to say, no, you cannot continue to behave in this way as a leader of a G7 country and expect to just get away with it without no. With no consequence. And to your question about media, I think that the consequence still eluded him. He still evaded the consequence because the consequences ended up falling more on myself as someone who dared to stand up against the Prime Minister. Um, I've been told that, you know, speaking on media is not. It's. It's. We. They won't allow it because, you know, you don't really like Trudeau. Like, it's not that I don't like him, I just. He lacks the self awareness to be a G7 leader. But, I mean, I'll have a beer with the guy. He just. He's not the barista at the coffee shop. He's a G7 leader. I'm not supposed to hold him to account because he's Trudeau. And so I've been removed from media. Some media, I should say, some of them still keep me on, but the Canadian media has still managed to glorify this individual and not hold him to the account the way that I think he should be.
- [92:40]
Jordan Peterson
All right, Selena, I'm going to stop there. That's a very good place to stop. We're pretty much at the point we should stop. For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue this conversation. We haven't talked about Selena's book. Will you tell everybody the title of your book? And when it was published, it's called.
- [92:56]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Can you hear me now? It was published in 2021, Penguin Random House. And it really. It's not just about my political time in politics. It really goes through my whole life and gives the readers a sense as to why I'm an advocate, why I'm so strong in what I do and what I say and why I hold fast to my principles 100% of the time. I know what it's like to feel hurt. I know what it's like to feel disenfranchised. I know what pain feels like, and I don't want other people to feel the same. So I wrote a book explaining all of my ups, downs, highs and lows.
- [93:34]
Jordan Peterson
We'll talk more about that book on the Daily Wire side and also we'll delve a little bit more well into the issues that we're, we discussed on this side of the discussion. I want to find out how you did get back on your feet after that year of searching for work after you had resigned as the, as the as the prime Minister's secretary. And for everybody watching and listening, join us on the daily wire side. Thank you you very much for agreeing to do this interview today and for walking us through that relatively unpleasant and personal recounting of what was quite the demanding three to five year period. I'm very much looking forward to finishing up the story on the daily wire side because I want to find out you know how things did go after your job search and how you put yourself back together and and thank you very much for letting everybody know about your experiences. I think people will find it extremely interesting. I certainly did and I'm very pleased that I know the rest of the story. So thank you very much.
- [94:43]
Selena Caesar-Chavannes
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.