 Good afternoon, welcome everyone. So I'm Jonathan Malloy and Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, and I'm pleased to welcome you to this afternoon's event, a conversation with Selina Caesar-Chevon. Before we proceed further, I do wanna take a moment to acknowledge that Carleton University is located on the traditional and unceded territories of the Algonquin Nation, and Carleton acknowledges its responsibilities to the Algonquin peoples. So welcome to today's event. We're gonna proceed in a moment to our main speaker. I do wanna recognize that this event has been organized and sponsored by faculty of three different academic units. My colleagues, Dr. Philippe Lagasse, the Northern Paris School of International Affairs and holder of the William and Jeanne Barton Chair in International Affairs, and Dr. Steven Atzi, Director of the Riddell Program in Political Management as well as myself, are all very pleased to welcome our guest here today. I also wanna thank Stephanie Burke and Biden Gagno from the Faculty of Public Affairs for their assistance in promoting today's event. So let me now introduce our speaker. Selina Caesar-Chevon is a business consultant, coach and international speaker. She currently serves as the Senior Advisor for EDI Initiatives and Adjunct Lecturer at Queen's University. And her book, Can You Hear Me Now, has just been published and is available from book sellers everywhere. She was the former Member of Parliament for Whitby, Parliamentary Secretary of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Parliamentary Secretary for International Development. During her term as Member of Parliament, she was awarded several distinctions, including a feature in the old Oprah Winfrey Magazine entitled, What Would You Stand Up For? And was named Woman of the Year for 2019 by Shadow Lane Magazine. She has a Bachelor of Science and an MBA in Healthcare Management and an Executive MBA. And she was named the Toronto Board of Trade Business and Entrepreneur of the Year and is a recipient of the Harry Jerome Young Entrepreneur Award from the Black Business and Professional Association. And Mrs. Caesar-Chevon is joined today by three graduate students from the Faculty of Public Affairs. I'll introduce them briefly. Abby Tate is a Masters of Political Management student. Delaine Bocchia is a Master's student in the School of International Affairs and Desiree Many is an MA student in the Department of Political Science. So after initial remarks by our main guest, they will each engage Mrs. Caesar-Chevon in further conversation. And so with no further ado, I will turn things over to you, Selena Caesar-Chevon. Well, thank you so much, Professor Malloy and to the University of Ottawa, to Professor Lagas and to Professor Aziz to Desi, Delaine and Abigail and everybody involved in the technical aspects of putting this on. Sometimes I think that these are more challenging than just me showing up and speaking at an event. So I appreciate everybody's commitment to this. I am speaking to you from my home in Whitby, Ontario and this is the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Skugog Island, Williams Treaty Territory. And in Black History Month, as with every time, but in particularly in Black History Month, I think it's really important for us to recognize the courageous struggle that our Indigenous brothers and sisters continue to face when we are fighting oppression and we join with them, join in those forces in fighting anti-Black racism and sorry, yeah, anti-Black racism and racism in general. And in fact, all forms of discrimination, whether it's homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, we all have a role to play. And I think in acknowledging where we are and acknowledging the history of where we are, we could acknowledge that there have been some struggles to get to a point of equity in our system and in our society. And so I'm gonna quickly share my screen and just go through a quick, like 10, 15 minute, just introduction of who I am and the things that I'm most passionate about. And I got a new computer, so everything works so much faster. It's brilliant, I don't, I just, so crazy. My husband kept saying, get a new computer to work. And I was like, no, no, and I got one. And now I'm like, wow, this is awesome. Anyhow, I am really passionate about transformative leadership. And before I go into the discussion with the students, I just want to let everybody who's invited here, all of our guests, know a little bit about me and the things that I really am passionate about, especially around advocacy and the power of disruption to make things work and to get things going. So really nevermind the left-hand side of the screen. The right-hand side is what I want people to pay attention to. And that's the definition by Dr. Carolyn Shield of transformative leadership, where leaders and everybody on this panel, all of our guests, everybody here has the opportunity to be a transformative leader using their values and their principles to guide their ability to take stands, to have the moral courage, to take stands, to live with tension and to engage with activism and advocacy. And right now, as we're at the intersection of racial inequality, a global pandemic, climate change, which didn't disappear, and a refugee crisis, just to name a few, taking it from the North American and the global context. We now more than ever need everyone to be transformative leaders, to be those individuals who are gonna say, we are going to take moral stands, we are going to have these awkward, uncomfortable conversations. We are gonna step outside of our box and we are gonna engage in activism and advocacy because there are people around the world who need us. And there are people in our own backyards who need us. And so many of you may know me from my political years and of course, elected in October of 2015 and entered into politics, 2016 bright-eyed, wish-y-tailed. And in 2017, really trying to find my purpose. So Barack Obama in that Netflix show by David Letterman, my next guest needs no introduction. He says that part of the ability to lead has less to do with regulations and legislation, which I knew I could vote on, I could vote, yay, nay, stand, sit. I could do that, I could read them just fine. But that has more to do with what I was searching for and more in order to disrupting the status quo, raising awareness and shaping culture. And so after hearing him say those words, I realized that in 2018, it started to click that my passion was people, my passion was in moving the status quo to create equity and raising awareness on issues that are often silenced, are often people who are whispering challenges that they're having and they're not being heard by leadership and shaping culture, shaping the way that we move forward in terms of being in spaces where we say we want diversity or we say we want to make spaces better, but we have a culture that is toxic and therefore when you plant the seeds of diversity they will never grow because culture eats strategy for breakfast. Peter Drucker famously said that. So I live by that. So I'm passionate about people and I like to ensure that when I'm working that I'm looking at the person at the intersection of racial inequality, a pandemic, climate change and a refugee crisis and often that person is a woman with multiple intersecting identities or someone who identifies as a woman with multiple intersecting identities. And more often than not, she looks like me. When you think about what is happening around the world, when you think about missing and murdered indigenous women, when you think about some of the challenges that we're having with COVID-19, the people who are dying, the people who are being impacted are most often women of color. And so when I sat as an independent in 2019 I realized that I didn't need a political career to understand how to be a transformative leader, how to be independent. I've been doing that all my life. Like I didn't need that whole painfully beautiful experience but I'm glad I had it because it made me realize how much more I wanted to be a transformative leader. And so what do transformative leaders do? They don't stop. They keep powering through and we don't need to look to the MVP in the United States, the Madame Vice President Kamala Harris to see what transformative leadership looks like. We have Anna Mae Paul, of course, elected within the Green Party as the first black female leader of a federal party. And these two women are really powerful but the woman in the bottom right hand side, this woman right here is who I really want you to pay attention to because this woman, Stacey Abrams, who took a defeat, a moment in her career when she must have felt like the whole world was watching her lose. And she took that, turned it around and made it into one of the most extraordinary victories the world has ever seen in terms of a ability of someone to take a state like Georgia and turn her wound into a win. And so with transformative leaders take all of their mess, all of their mistakes, their flaws, their pains, their hurts and transform them and add them to their strengths, their resilience, their perseverance, their determination and understand the value that they have in them. And therefore they are an asset to any organization, community, school, conversation or policy development. And so I really appreciate Stacey Abrams because she just kept going and I appreciate her because two things that I'm very passionate about are equity and mental health. And today we see, and I'm gonna use three examples here where equity and mental health intersect. On our day to day, we hear about this term of racial microaggressions and how our unconscious bias, the things that we say to people that give them a sense that they don't belong, the things that make them feel like they are the other, how they create that sense of inequity. But according to the American Psychological Association in 2018, microaggressions or everyday racism, the death by a thousand cuts is not just, you know something that creates inequity. It also, according to the American Psychological Association not according to Selena in 2018 said that microaggressions cause trauma. They didn't say it caused pain. It didn't say it caused hurt. It didn't say it caused general malaise or unwellness. It's a trauma because you add up those death by a thousand cuts every single day and you compound them in someone and their physical and mental health deteriorate because they're carrying the regular stresses of life and then you add in that extra element of racism and they wear it as a backpack and it drags them down and it causes them physical and mental illness. But let's go a little bit broader when we think about promoting inequity. In April of 2020, the government of Ontario and the government of Toronto had an opportunity to make a choice, to make a choice because they were hearing information from the United States saying that black people were being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Ontario said, well, you know what? COVID-19 does not discriminate so we're not gonna collect race-based data. The city of Toronto said, maybe we should collect race-based data. The city of Toronto did what is actually required of us to do in this book called How to Be an Anti-Racist. This book says that every single decision that we make either creates equity or further creates inequity. Every decision. So if we know that a decision to collect race-based data is going to create equity, it's gonna make us see where there are gaps, it's gonna see where there are pain points, that is an anti-racist move that the city of Toronto made in April of 2020. And now we see the data where 52% of the city of Toronto is racialized people, but the impact of COVID-19 is 80%. 80% of COVID-19 hits racialized people in the city of Toronto. The black population makes up 9% of the city but makes up 30, up to 30% of those with COVID-19, 25% of those who are hospitalized. The only way that you could create a system that gets rid of inequity is when you use the tools to create equity. And this is not just a graph. These are people. These are individuals who are being impacted here that where their mental health, their anguish for their family is being destroyed. But let's just look at one more and I'm gonna wrap this up. This one last slide here when we look at systemic racism because it's a thing that people can't answer. I don't know, how do you define systemic racism? It's like what? This is from the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies. And in this, so again, not Selena talking, you could go Google it right now, Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies. 40% of the children in the Children's Aid Society in Toronto are black children, 40%. Again, remember I said we make up only 9% of the population. How is that possible? Well, it's possible because based on biases, racism that is embedded within the system, they enter child welfare at disproportionate rates, they stay within the system at disproportionate rates and they exit the system, not being returned to their families like white children are, but they're exited out of the system in a way that makes them go into criminal system. They don't graduate from high school, they have early pregnancies. So at the end of the day, we all need to be transformative leaders because the world needs us to show up. In 2020 and beyond, we need to keep going. One of my favorite books is Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derek Bell. And in this book, he talks about the courageous struggle of Dr. Martin Luther King to keep going even in the face of insurmountable odds when he talked about civil rights. And he did so, he spoke the truth as Dr. King viewed it, even when that truth alienated rather than unified, upset minds rather than com-tarts and subjected the speaker to general censure rather than a claim. The world needs us to show up. We don't have a choice. We don't have any time to ask a question about, can I be an ally? Am I an ally? How to be an ally? We don't want hearts in the right place or your intentions are good. We don't have time for that anymore. Right now, what we need is all hands on deck to create equity, to transform the world and to create a better space for everyone. And so I'll leave it at that. And I'll have these wonderful students here ask some questions. Great. Thank you. So please go ahead and I'm gonna leave it up to all of you to have a conversation at this point. Hi, Selena. Thank you so much for having us to engage in conversation with you. I'm gonna get right to my question. Yes, let's do this. It relates a lot with what you're talking about with transformative leadership, making decisions within institutions and traditions that were not designed for us or marginalized people, often demands an evaluation of our personal and political identities and results in placing strategy or getting along over our principles. Seeing as you have made such bold assertions of your personal principles in politics and in business, can you expand on your experience in this and offer advice on how to navigate these hard decisions? Like, can we separate our personal and political or business principles or do you find them to be like intrinsically linked? Sorry, I forget things. So I have to write everything down. You're speaking very fast, Desi. You mind me, I'm my daughter. Oh my goodness. I just wanna go over and like give you a hug. Okay. So I'm gonna have to hug Desiree when I see her. I'm in, I'm here. So let's just start with the fact that people with intersecting identities, everything we do is political. Every single thing I do is political, just by default. The way I wear my hair, the way I dress, what I say, whether I smile, whether I don't smile, whether I click my heels, what everything I do is political. Let's just start there. Whether I want it to be or not, everybody's gonna overanalyze it. Everything I say. So let's start there. But Desi, they're gonna talk about you anyway. So let's give them something to talk about, okay? So let's talk about going along to get along. In his essay, Clayton Christensen who passed away, he was a Harvard professor. He passed away within the last year. In his essay called, How Will You Measure Your Life? Everybody read the essay, Fentastic Essay. He says that it is easier to keep hold of your values and your principles 100% of the time. Every time I say this, I get choked up. It's easier to hold onto your values 100% of the time than it is to hold onto them 98% of the time, 100%. And I'll tell you why it's good to hold onto them. Don't let them waiver. People ask me when they read my book, why did I write about all these pains and hurts and guilt and stuff like that? It's because my values that I have now are tied to that pain. They're tied to that hurt. They create the empathy that is required to ensure that I do not waiver when it comes to my principles and my values. That allows me in a moment like when I left politics, let's not say when I left politics, when I sat as an independent, because that's what I started off a little bit on that. When I sat as an independent, that was a very easy decision for me. In fact, it was a decision that took four hours to make. I was in a meeting at 10 o'clock where, of course, up until that point, we were talking about Jody Wilson-Rable, SNC, Lavalan scandal, whether you're a lover or a hater, not the point of the conversation. SNC, Lavalan affair. We had just come through a movement of me too, where we were saying to women, we need to believe her. Believe her when she said she's assaulted, believe her when she said she's bullied, believe her when she said she's pressured, believe her. And at that moment, I was seeing a system that I was a part of, leave her when it was inconvenient instead of believing her. So you're supposed to believe her when it's convenient and leave her when it's not. Hold onto those values 100% of the time because I know the hurt it feels when you are left. I know how it feels when you're not believed. I know how it feels to tell those lies and to hurt. I know how that feels. So you don't waver in how you, when you get to a position where you're able to make that choice to stand on your principles or to stay, it just makes it so much easier to say, yo, I'm gonna just stand right here on my principles because they're dope and I'm good. And it makes it so much easier, but you have to know where your principles are tied to, right? If they're not tied to anything, then it's easy to just let them go. Thank you. Let the answer to the question. I don't know, I went off on a little tangent there. I think we can. Okay. Who's, who's next? I believe Delaine will be speaking to you next. Delaine. All three of you could just unmute because we could just have a conversation. Everybody could just dive right in. Yeah, sure. So, you know, first and foremost, and I've said this a million times, but I wanna make sure that I'm saying in front of this audience, thank you for, you know, for this book and for sharing your story with the world because first off, you didn't have to do it and I'm sure that there were sacrifices that were made to do it. But again, you're proving to us that exactly that standing in your principles 100% of the time is what you chose to do. And in standing in your principles and how you truly believe about transformative leadership, you have this, I could see how this is something you had to share with the world. But again, I wanted to, wanted to thank you for that and for the introduction. So I'm gonna jump into, I guess a question, just tying into what you had said before, a question on the art of managing one's presence in the world. This is something that you touch on in later chapters of your book. You start off by talking about your childhood and your university experience, the challenges that you faced, the defeat and ultimately the redirection that you gained from your experiences. You're forgiving of yourself and you become increasingly conscious of the power of your voice and of your presence in the world. And I wanna touch on a lesson that you share about the art of managing your presence in the world. Could you elaborate on that lesson? How do you cultivate and manage your presence? Of course it's rooted in your values, but I really wanna touch on that development phase, that development process. Oh, so this is a great question because it is a development process. I didn't arrive here, like I wasn't born here. I was born at night, but not last night like this and all this like glory. We're gonna keep it fun today, guys. And that's just it. So managing that, I think, so I talk in the book about mistake, right? My friend mistake. And we often believe that we make mistakes and they're the worst things that have happened to us and oh my God, we will never be able to survive after this, right? But we never take the time or nobody has really taught us how to take the time to appreciate the mistake because we're in the mess, right? We don't understand that the mess could create a message at some point because we're in the mess and we'll probably need deep in it and nobody wants to be messy. But I would say that, and I'm 46 right now. So going into politics, I didn't even understand that. So the first two years of politics, I was relatively silent. Like I actually would love for people to go back and look at my Twitter feeds from 2016 and 2017. Relatively quiet. Just regular standard party messaging. Liberal say this, Selena repeats that. Really, just playing along, going along to get along. And then in September of 2017, I kept saying to my husband, like something is killing me. Like something, I felt it. I felt something in my chest. And I said something in this job is killing me. I don't know what it is. And I mean, part of it was the behavior. Part of it was some of the things that were going on at work. But part of it was the fact that I was quieting myself to fit in. I was quieting myself to fit into a space that was not designed for me to fit in in the first place. How crazy. The place was built on an exclusionary principle of not having women. We didn't even get the right to vote for like how many years after the place was right. No indigenous, no black. Like there were so many people excluded. And here I am trying to fit into someone's limited imagination of what the space could have been, right? So I, at that in September of 2017, I was like, oh my God, right. I need to show up. And it took that pain. It took that like sort of hurt. It took feeling sort of like I don't belong. And then finally sort of saying, but you do belong that conversation that you have with yourself that says, no, no, I know this. But I'm feeling like I don't, but I do. Yes, I do. I know what I do. I swear to God, I know it. But no, you don't know, you don't know it. Like you're having the conversation with the imposter syndrome. Yeah. And then I was like, I said to my husband, you know what, in September, 2017, guess what's gonna happen? The gloves come off. And he's like, babe, babe, whoa, whoa, whoa, everybody calm down, babe. Do not take the gloves off. I'm like, babe, no, I can't do it. I can't keep living like this. I can't keep conforming to be little Selena. And then I remember having a conversation with Michelle Rempel, lover or hater, not the point. Michelle Rempel said to me, so I said, I was, I'm afraid of being labeled the angry black woman. And she said, they're gonna call you that anyway. And it was like, oh my God, because when we get passionate, when we get, you know, when we are, we live with conviction, we're passionate, we're articulate, we demand, we don't have step, then we're labeled. So they're gonna talk about us anyways. So how do I manage that? I finally figured it out. And this is after years of hiding myself and then bringing myself forward and high like in business, hiding my identity, bringing it forward, hiding my identity, bringing it forward high. And then I was like, what are you doing? Girl, like why didn't somebody teach me this right at the beginning? Like where is the book that says, do this? And so I made one. I made a book that says, do this, like you're badass. So be it, right? And I learned then to manage that presence. I learned then to say, I need to use that voice. I need to use that voice to amplify the voices of everybody I know I represent. I need to amplify the voices of those who McKinsey, and company says that, if we got rid of racial inequality in the United States, their 2019 report, if we got rid of racial inequality in the United States, it would add 1 to 1.5 billion dollars to the United States GDP by 2028. These are people that we call minorities. These are the people that we silence when women globally are able to reach their full potential. It will add 28 trillion dollars to the global GDP. These are the people that are often described as voiceless. It's not that they're voiceless. We just don't listen, right? The voiceless, if you're so voiceless, why can you add 28 trillion dollars to the global GDP? 28 trillion, you know. I don't even know how many zeros that is. What, nine? Well, I don't know. I'm not math. It's not math or nothing. But the point is, is that in managing that presence and figuring it out, I wanted to say to other women in particular, other people with intersecting identities, yes, like how I end the book, it's not enough for the world to hear me. We need to hear you too. That's why I ended it that way, because I wanted people to know the power. And I put those stats in the book. I wanted people to know the power that the people have, democracy, the power of the people. I just figured that out at 46. I should have been figured out. How old are you? How old are you, Dylan? I'm 28. Yeah, I should have figured it out at 28. Somebody should have told me this at 28. I'm gonna stop it. Could you imagine? I'd be like the president of the United States but I wasn't even born there. Like I find a way to figure that out. Okay, Abigail, let's go. No, that's amazing. So I actually wanted to ask you about a specific moment that you talked about in your book that really resonated with me. When you met, hope to pronounce this, Gene Lazarus, the director of research operations. And it really resonated with me when you said, representation matters, but Gene taught me that access to representation is even more important. So this reminded me of when I was a young co-op student in the federal public service and I had an Asian Canadian director general who was absolutely amazing in her role. And in the public service a lot of the time, the higher ups don't really have time for students. They don't really ever interact with students and I've experienced that at other departments. But she spent so much time talking to me, asking about what my goals were, allowing me the opportunity to learn about her career trajectory and really like showing me the ropes of what she had to navigate as she climbed the public service. So I'd love to kind of hear a little bit more about perhaps why there's such a significant difference between representation and access to representation for young people of color as they begin their careers and kind of how that changed your approach to politics when you became that leader. Right, this is a great question and I have to map out my answer because I'm gonna forget a few things, okay? So yes, so Gene Lazarus, when I met her like, okay, so I bomb out of university for those who haven't read the book, I'm not gonna go into that, but I bomb out of university. I restart my career, go into research and then I meet this person that has, so all I wanted to be was a neurosurgeon my whole life. So just give a context, all I want. So when you bomb out of university, the last, let me tell you, the last thing that you're gonna be is a neurosurgeon, right? So it's like all of a sudden, everything that I've ever lived up for is now like gone, right? So I don't know anything about anything and the interesting thing about an immigrant experience from my immigrant experience is my parents only gave us like five options, doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant or banker. Banker, I don't understand, but like those are the only things that you could be. So I picked doctor and that was all I knew to do in science, right? When I went back and got into research, I started getting exposed to all of these different things. And so seeing the name Jean Lazarus, Director of Research Operations, I was like, who is that? Like I want to be her. And so you get that sort of same kind of thing, Abigail, where it's like, oh, she can't, she's not going to talk to me, you know, I'm just gonna like, I'm just gonna like, pop up every, everywhere she is, like poker room. Are you guys are too, too young to know poker? Well, I watched poker room. So thank God. So, you know, I just popped up and then, and then she started talking to me. She started like just like, just a big sister kind of thing. It was so natural. It wasn't like, oh, I am going to be your mentor. Let me put my arm around you. No, it was like, just a regular, yo, let's, you know, let's talk, let's have lunch. And so when I got into politics, I would see other young black women, young women of color and just imagine, like just think about how I felt in this space. So that gray sense of unbelonging, that's a theme throughout the book. I imagined how they would feel in that space. So I'd like slip them my number, be like, no. And we would not, we wouldn't acknowledge each other, except with like the little head thing when we walk by each other. It wasn't like, hey, sister, how you doing? We weren't doing that. Cause we didn't have enough of us numbers and we were afraid of being labeled, like if more than, you know, two of us were walking together. So we, I'd slip them my number and we'd have these conversations usually on a Sunday evening. And I knew how important it was for them to have access to be able to ask me questions, for them to be able to cry, for them to be able to let out their frustrations because I knew if they went back to work on Monday with those same frustrations, what I talked about in the presentation, those microaggressions that caused trauma, it would hurt them because it was hurting me. And I didn't want them to go through that alone. I wanted them to know that even with my big tights up, I was still getting microaggressions. It wasn't going anywhere. So I wanted to plant the seed for them to then do that with other people that they knew. But Abigail, before I leave the answer to this question, I want to be very clear that when we talk about allies, there were two other people in the book that were just as powerful as Jean Lazarus, Carol Greenwood and Dawn Stuss. Carol Greenwood is an older white woman. Dawn Stuss is a balding older what was an balding older white man. And he died last year. And it breaks my heart every time I think about him. But those two, sorry. Those two individuals changed my life in a way that allowed me to even see Jean Lazarus. You know what I mean? So if you close yourself off, number one, so speaking to you three young, if you close yourself off to those opportunities that someone who doesn't look like you can provide, you're closing yourself off to a lot. But to our allies, to our leaders, to the Professor Malloy's in the room, Professor Lagasse, Professor Aziz in the room, you have to see people. When Dawn Stuss saw me, I didn't even know what he saw. I don't know what Carol saw in me. They saw things I didn't see in myself because they were looking at me. And what often happens in these spaces, even as a parliamentary secretary, to a leader of a G7 country, people look through me to the white guy in the back for the parliamentary secretary that is back there because it's so hard to believe that she's right here. You need to see each other. This is what this moment of racial inequality, this is what 2020 should have done, should have empowered leaders to have these unusual conversations with unusual suspects. If you're talking to the same people that you were talking to for the last five years, if you're putting forward the same students that you've always put forward, then you're doing something so fundamentally wrong. It's shameful. So in this moment, man, if you made me mess up my mascara here, Abigail, like I'm not even playing with you right now. You're gonna make us all cry. I know, because I have other events. Like I have other, stop being so selfish. I have other events. So you cannot do this right now. There's a role to play for everyone and nobody gets a free pass, nobody. So there's a responsibility when we see things like this, there's a responsibility to the leadership, to say, yes, let me give access, but there's also a responsibility to us to say, this person is telling me something, perhaps I should listen. Thank you for that. Thank you. So I'm really interested in this concept of radical negativities. Negativities because they're things that are often rejected from formal spaces and radical because they transform the spaces in which they exist. Things like fear, passion, anger, contradiction, paradox, yeah, which are often like disregarded in formal spaces like academia and politics and business. And in your reflections, hindsight allows for this very beautiful, very profound consideration of these things that we call negativities and how they influence your actions and experiences and then therefore how they transform the spaces you work in. But I'd be interested to know your opinion on how these like negativities can be considered and accommodated in institutions and in the moment, right? So we don't have to look back and gain knowledge from the past, but how these negativities can sort of be mobilized and valued in the imminent present. And so yeah, how do we set up? What do you think? How do we set up spaces where these things can be considered and not rejected? So it's the same about around the conversation of dissent, right? Like, I mean, we hear organizations saying like we value dissent because dissent allows us to create products and services that are better. We have to have these challenging conversations and we have to like hash it all out in the boardroom table. However, however, I think that sometimes we don't want too much, right? So let me rewind that a little bit because my thoughts are going all over the place. First, I need to go back to this conversation about culture. Because if culture eats strategy for breakfast, Peter Drucker said it, not me. Then if the culture of the space doesn't allow for dissent, doesn't allow for passion, usually when it's a woman saying it, it's anger. Yeah, yeah. Conviction, it's fear. Oh my God, she's so like, she's so afraid of her. If we don't, if the culture of the space doesn't allow for this kind of tension. So remember when I talked about faces at the bottom of the wall, right? The tension, if it doesn't allow for that, then it'll always be negative. If the culture of the organization doesn't allow for it, it'll always be negative. So how do you change the culture of an organization so that it shifts? And that is where inclusivity comes in, right? So people say diversity, equity, inclusion. And I just, I'm like, first of all, it's not all one word. And they mean different things. And diversity is a tool that's leveraged to create inclusion, because now we're having conversations, we're listening to people's stories, we're creating the empathy that's required to act, to be anti-racist. And therefore then we have a goal towards or we strive towards equity, right? So if, so we have to actually look at our space, assess where the pain points are. And often we can only assess where those pain points are. I wish I put up another picture, but it's a caricature called the problem woman of color in the workplace. And it shows like the woman entering and then going through and then exiting, right? We don't really take time to do those exit interviews and really see where the pain points are on our organizations. The DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion is a multi-billion dollar industry that has not benefited black and indigenous people. Like really think about this, we keep making these investments in DEI. Like we keep shortening the words, right? We need to make the investment in equity, in equity. And then work backwards from that. Create the space that when you see someone who has a dissenting opinion, who's passionate about it, because remember where that passion comes from, that conviction comes from, the pain, the hurt that you've experienced, that's where that passion comes from. That's where you could say, no, we need to make sure that the ramps on the street are lower because it not only helps people with disabilities, it helps my elderly grandparent with their mobile device. It helps the mom or the parent with the stroller. It helps the three year olds who's riding their bike across the street. We need accessibility because you know where that pain comes from. You know where your convictions come from. So if we're able to share these stories that are brought about only with inclusion because we've leveraged diversity and we didn't just use diversity as a window dressing, usually this is what we do with diversity. Okay, we're gonna hire Desi. That's great. Okay, we got three women that we're hiring here. We got Desi, she's, well, she looks black. We'll just say black and a woman. Oh my God, that's a two for one. That's good. Okay, who do we have next here? We have Abigail, that's great. Oh my God, we got another two for one. Cha-ching, right? And then Delayne, I mean, clearly, like she's black. Okay, and we'll do, no seriously, this is how people view diversity. Check, check, check, check. Now I've checked six boxes. This is great. Now, when we do our black history month, we're gonna get Delayne, we're gonna take a few pictures with you. Is that okay? Okay, yeah, we'll do that. And then Asian Heritage Month, just assume that Abigail, yeah, we'll use you for that. And we're not like actually using your brain. We're not actually being inclusive. We're using you as a window dressing. And therefore you cannot change the culture because as soon as you start talking strategy, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Is she talking about strategy? We didn't hire her for strategy. What's she doing? We hired her because she was the, was she the black girl? Did she not ask her? And then all of a sudden you're talking about strategy and they're like, oh my God, I'm so afraid of you. Your anger makes me nervous. This is no place for dissent. Come on, we need to change the culture of organization. It seems silly, but this is actually the process. This is actually what we need to do. And if we're not willing to do that, any strategy we have around diversity, inclusion, blah, blah, blah, will not yield fruits, will not create that $1.5 billion or that $28 trillion. It just won't. And that's why it costs organizations to not be inclusive. Get it? Easy math. I said I wasn't good at it, but it's really easy. I wanted to quickly touch on, or go into my second question because it kind of touches on the intersecting identities that you just mentioned from a lens of work-life balance. And of course, parenting, I know everybody can see my beautiful little girl behind me. So for those who don't know, I am a full-time student. I'm a parent to a toddler and I'm a part-time public servant. Trying my best to manage all of my priorities. And you mentioned in chapter seven of your book that there's no such thing as balance in a conversation with your daughter. And you say that balance, you continue to say that balance would be unfair. So I definitely recognize my privilege in being able to do all of the things that I'm doing and having support in childcare to do that. But like you mentioned in your introduction, I'm very conscious of the disproportionate impact that the pandemic, that the economic downturn, that so many global issues have on women and especially women of color. So, I really wanna ask you what your advice would be to young women who may have a family like myself or be wanting to start a family who feel like it's not possible to have it all or feel like they need to make sacrifices to their family life to be able to succeed and be the disruptive transformative change maker that you're currently inspiring them to be. Okay, first of all, we can have it all. But we actually need to prioritize things. So I like that you said manage priorities. And I also wanna appreciate that you said, recognize your privilege. Cause I think in this conversation around privilege, people are like, oh my God, I don't have privilege. Everybody has privilege, calm down. It's just like some people have a lot. Some people have a little, it's cool. Let's just recognize it. But in recognizing that privilege, you also recognize the space that you occupy. And I just think that that's awesome. Now answering the question, how do you manage your priorities? Cause clearly in the book, I was managing my priorities somewhat until I almost got divorced, right? And then it's like, oh, oh, so I'm not managing the priorities. Oh, okay, okay, I got it now. Okay. And so it's interesting, cause again, going through this painfully beautiful experience of politics, I was saying to my husband, and I mean, even like as nice as our Instagram and our Facebook pictures are, I wanna divorce this man like every three months. Like honestly, he gets on my nerves sometimes. It's just our divorce lawyer is also our good friend. So she just won't let me do it cause she knows I'm a hothead. But anyhow, I call her, I'm like, that's it. He's done. She's like, okay, Selena, sure. But the point of it all is, is that towards the end of 2019 or so, I felt like my cup was full. And the only two things that I could hold in my cup were my children and my work. Like, cause I had to finish my term as a member of parliament. And that's the only two things I could fit. And I kept thinking like, why is my cup so full but it only has two things in it. It's not making any sense because at one point in my life, I was able to like manage myself, my husband and myself were the two things that were outside of the cup. Cause you just don't have time for myself right now. Like I'm not gonna take care of myself. And I certainly, I'm not like worrying about you, right? So my children and my work. It wasn't until I started writing this book that I realized how much garbage I was holding on to. And it was such a cathartic experience to write it down and to let it out. Let out all the pain, let out all the hurt, let out all the like craziness that I was doing. So it's not just about managing the priorities. It's about understanding where you fit in those priorities and how you're able to best manage them. Cause if you're managing your priorities, but your plate, your platter is so full of junk, then what are you managing? You're managing your kind of half stepping on your management. So I needed to get rid of all that junk. And now I could see that my cup is full, but I have my children, my work, my husband and most importantly, myself in there. Right, Delaine? Look at me, Delaine. I see you. Put yourself in your cup. Did you hear what I said? Absolutely. Okay. Don't let me come for you. Put yourself in your cup, I already have like many times. Put yourself in your cup. And that, I don't know what that means, but for me, it meant that I had to start taking my medication. Of course, I live with major depressive disorder and anxiety. I need to be compliant. I have been compliant all year. Congratulations, Selena. Say it. No scandal, no controversy. Right, no. See, the professor's the only one that clapped for me. I'm disappointed in you three ladies. Compliance with medication is so hard with mental illness. We're always thinking that we're okay without it and so we stopped taking it and then we fall back into depression and then we're like, oh my God, maybe I should take my medication and then we fall back in. I've actually been compliant and it's been the best few months of my life. And I tweet about it, like I put it out there, I talk about it. So what does this look like? Compliant with my medication, I do my meditation, I do my eat, write, drink lots of water, I try to exercise, but I don't like to sweat. So I don't know how that's possible. Sweating is so gross. So I walk around places and yeah, we need to take care of ourselves. If we're not taking care of ourselves, we're not managing our priorities at all. Thank you. Okay, so I just wanted to make sure because I know we're running out of time but I actually have a good closing question, I guess. Oh, are we done? I don't want to keep people too. We're almost done, but we still have a coffee a minute. So we can take- Oh, I thought we were going longer. I have to answer these questions faster. Go ahead. It's okay, no, we appreciate the answers. Exactly. But early on your talk and early on in your book, you kind of talked about that, the idea of fitting into spaces that run according to like a narrative of power that's literally designed to exclude women, indigenous people, black individuals, really anyone that doesn't fit a very specific character that we expect of people in power. So kind of in closing then, do you have kind of, what is your key pieces of advice for young people who we are all in this talk, a lot of them are graduate students, graduate students who are just beginning a career? What can we do to enter these spaces, change these spaces? What are those kind of, when we close the last page of your book, what do you want us to remember in our work, in our personal lives, in our social lives that you think will help change these spaces? Live authentically. That's a lot of pressure. No, no, no, actually it's a great question. Live authentically. Okay, first of all, show up. Cause that initial inertia to like even show up because you're afraid is, it's scary. So show up and then show up as your 100% authentic self as long as it's safe to do so. Cause some places it's still not safe to be authentic and we need to be mindful of that. But to show up as your 100% authentic self, bring all of your pains, your hurts, your everything, your strengths, your triumphs, bring them. You're valuable and therefore you are an asset. You are 20, especially you three ladies, sorry professor but you ladies, you are the 28 trillion. You are the 28 trillion dollar investment in the global GDP. Mackenzie only studied women. I mean, that's what I was talking about. You are the 28 trillion, you have to remember that. So if you do not show up as 100% authentically yourself, you are diminishing that value at the world's expense. So show up and be authentic and tell your story. Your story deserves to be told and it deserves to be listened to. We cannot create empathy. If you're looking at, you know, how to create equity in a workplace, Dr. Robert Livingston has created the press model for that. At the center of PRESS, the model, I won't get into it, is E for empathy. You create racial equity in workplaces by creating empathy between people. How do we do that is by listening to stories but people can only listen to your story if you tell it to change those spaces. Do not conform to fit, show up as show up as 100% yourself if it is safe to do so and speak up. Let people know who you are. Let them know who you are, okay? That's it. All right, thank you, thank you very much. We will give a little applause here. That's good, thanks very much. Yeah, we are unfortunately out of time but it's always great I think when the conversation is really, really rolling. Oh, gosh, I didn't even know. But that was just great. And I just want to thank each of you just for allowing me to share the space and just listen in as you were talking. So it just leaves me to sort of, to thank our special guest, Selina of course, and our three panelists here for their three conversation. I do want to emphasize again that the book is available at booksellers everywhere. So the various people, particularly my colleagues like I say and Steve Nazi for putting this on here. And I'll just conclude, I will conclude one thing just Selina from your book, one of my favorite parts was just after you met President Obama and you mentioned how that was on your bucket list and you were now, this was the last thing on your bucket list and someone asked you, what's next, what's next like that? And you said, why don't need a bucket list? I want to be in other people's bucket list. I want people to say, I want to meet Selina. So we've all done that now. We can all kick that off our bucket list. So thanks for being part of the conversation here today. So I do want to thank everyone else for tuning in. We did record this. So it is our hope to post this later for, so you can let anyone know who didn't make it today that they can watch it. And with that, I'm just going to conclude and thank you again, Selina for coming. Thank you, Desi Abigail and Delaine for participating. Thank you for watching and have a good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Bye. Bye Selina. Bye. Bye.