Biography
Celina Caesar-Chavannes
Board Member, Elexicon; Author, Can You Hear Me Now?; Former Member of Parliament, and Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau and Minister of International Development
Celina Caesar-Chavannes is a former Member of Parliament, and Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau and to International Development. Celina is the only Black person elected to Federal parliament in the Region of Durham in Canada’s history, and only the second to be Parliamentary Secretary to a Canadian Prime Minister.
As MP, Celina advocated for people suffering with mental illness and was named Champion of Mental Health Parliamentarian Award in May 2017 by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health. She was named one of the Most Influential People of African Descent, Global 100 Under 40, Politics & Governance and Black Parliamentarian of the Year in 2017, and featured in the April 2018 edition of O (Oprah Winfrey) Magazine entitled, “What would you stand up for?”. Celina was also named Chatelaine Magazine’s Woman of the Year 2019.
Before entering politics, Mrs. Caesar-Chavannes was a successful entrepreneur. She was the recipient of both the Toronto Board of Trade’s Business Entrepreneur of the Year for 2012 – the first Black woman awarded this honour, and the 2007 Black Business and Professional Association’s Harry Jerome Young Entrepreneur Award.
An international lecturer on the inclusion of marginalized populations in clinical research, Ms. Caesar-Chavannes has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto, an MBA in Healthcare Management from the University of Phoenix, an Executive MBA from the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto and is currently enrolled in a Neuroscience (PhD) at Queen’s University.
