The Night I Had Dinner With Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau
Dinner with Biden and Trudeau
I think I ordered the vegan meal…
It was the winter of 2016, about a month after Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were preparing to leave office.
I had been living in the USA for 2 years at this point, and had no idea what this type of election meant for the country I now called home. In hindsight, I could have been living here 20 years and I still wouldn’t have been prepared for the leadership style that was coming.
It was late in the evening in Los Angeles (which meant very late/early in Ottawa) when I got a message from someone inside the Prime Minister’s office, “any chance you’d be able to get to Ottawa Thursday night? biden/trudeau dinner.” Biden , as in Joe Biden the Vice President of the United States, and Trudeau as in the Prime Minister of Canada who’s bromance with President Barack Obama was still a meme-worthy pop culture headline south of the border.
But, Thursday was only a few days away and my calendar was locked in with shoots for my new TV gig. Of course, it’s not every day you get invited to a State Dinner. And to be honest, I was grasping at straws for post-election hope: hope for the future, hope that I had made the right choice moving to the USA, hope that everything was going to be OK. And maybe this dinner would provide some.
It was also the week Biden made headlines for saying he wasn’t ruling out a 2020 Presidential run. Of course, I made it happen.
The dinner was held at the newly refurbished Sir John A. Macdonald building on Wellington Street, across from Parliament Hill. A snow storm set in that night and a blizzard caused ‘white out’ conditions as we drove to the event. The whole thing seemed surreal. I was in the back of my parents car (yes, my folks drove me downtown!) we were driving by the Hill, as we had a thousand times.
I grew up in Ottawa. I remember being a kid and every time our family would drive by the Hill, I would imagine the Prime Minister inside, reading big dusty books in some giant library that looked like the extravagant literary room from Disney’s Beauty & the Beast. And here I was, back in my hometown, riding in my parents car, driving by the same landmark, but this time to have a dinner hosted by the Prime Minister. And as fate would have it, the Prime Minister who happens to be the son of the PM who brought my parents to Canada as refugees. Pinch me.
The room was full of dignitaries, former Prime Ministers (I got to chat with Chrétien and Mulroney) and other notable people. I was still quite unsure of how I scored the invite.
The night started out light. PM Trudeau joked: “Tonight there will be no Ryan Reynolds or Blake Lively. I’m the only eye candy you’ll get Joe!”
To which Biden quipped back, “I used to be eye candy too! You just wait 40 years!”
VP Biden went on to talk at length about his love for Canada, he told the story of losing his first wife and daughter in a tragic car accident (my first time hearing it) and how former PM Pierre Trudeau had been there to comfort him. He told the PM, “you’re a successful father when your children turn out better than you. Your father was a successful father.”
The exchange between the two leaders was a nice reminder of calm, professional, positive, leadership.
But the 3 messages Biden came to deliver became suddenly serious, he was clear, and he was impactful: 1) Our climate is in trouble; 2) Nationalist movements are taking over democratic countries around the globe; 3) The world needs Canada to lead by example “very, very badly.”
“The changes that are going to take place (over the next 4 years) are going to be astronomical,” said Biden. “Progress is going to be made but it’s going to take men like you Mr. Prime Minister, who understand it has to fit within the context of a liberal economic order, a liberal international order, where there’s basic rules of the road.”
Biden called climate change “the most consequential issue of our generation.”
In December of 2016, Canada and the US had (for the previous 14 months, or so) been touted as strong climate allies after Trudeau earned props from Obama for their partnership in negotiating the Paris Accord. Meanwhile, Presidential-candidate Donald Trump had been tweeting, “global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” That’s when it clicked for me. This is why I had been invited.
I thought of the documentary I had done in the Great Bear Rainforest, and then the recent trip back to the region I made with NHL legend Scott Niedermayer. Both stories got lots of traction among Canadian millennials, many of whom (at the time of my first visit in 2012) weren’t even aware the rainforest existed before my stories aired on MTV.
For the previous decade of my TV career I had really started to focus on environmental journalism and social justice stories written for a more youthful audience than traditional news. I had loved helping to create/host/produce MTV IMPACT which brought me everywhere from South Sudan to “the Canadian amazon.” I had also been working extra shifts as a reporter for Discovery Channel, which sent me to cover many global stories, the most impactful being on the ground in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
While I was encouraged to grow at the beginning of my career and tackle social justice issues on MTV News, towards the end of my time at MTV (after the upper brass had been completely replaced many times over, and as I became a more recognizable name with Canadian audience) I started getting discouraged. I was being encouraged to fit a mold (which I won’t go into here) and was being “groomed” for a different type of show, which was tied to job security. This guidance from supervisors was primarily based on how I looked, despite me vocalizing my passion for a different style of storytelling. No matter how much my star rose at the Canadian network that I worked at, no matter how loud I asked to continue my work in serious environmental storytelling or talk show formats where I could address important issues, I was always told that what mattered most was ratings. More than journalism? The environmental specials I was allowed to host/produce to “keep (me) happy” were buried in late time slots. The shows I was assigned were based on what suited my look and my “brand.” And the message was mixed: I was too ethnic and too ethically ambiguous, I was not pretty enough and too pretty to be taken seriously, I was smart and not smart enough. (If you’re the kid of refugees you will understand, being taught your entire life to be grateful for the chances you get. Don’t ask for more, just put your head down and work hard and say thank you. So that’s what I did. Well, until enough was enough.)
When I moved to LA, that’s the success I kept measuring myself by at first. I accepted job opportunities based on: ratings & paychecks.
I got a a great job working in Los Angeles, I was shooting in Hollywood, I mean…this must be the definition of success, right?
And then I was invited to this dinner.
That evening cemented the trajectory of the rest of my career. I was a Canadian, living in the USA. But more importantly, I was an environmental storyteller, living in the USA, with ties to Canada. And the stories I had been fighting to tell - even the ones buried at 11:30pm on Wednesday nights - they mattered.
Ok to be honest, having a handful of great conversations about climate solutions at a posh dinner wasn’t the only reason I focused in on my environmental storytelling. There were a handful other important factors already at play. But, it legitimized so many years of important hard work, and real journalistic instinct, that got downplayed by click-bait-hungry TV execs. The inspiration from this dinner nudged me closer to the edge of the metaphorical cliff I would eventually leap from.
Look, I didn’t leave a great job at MTV after a decade, just to do the same things I was already doing there, in a new country…I left to grow as a journalist and as a woman. I left to get a clean slate. I left to feel comfortable in my own skin. I left to passionately chase my curiosity and use video as a way to bring important stories to marginalized communities (like the one I grew up in) communities that legally have the rights to understand how environmental decisions made by their governments impact their lives and livelihoods.
Many things were discussed over dinner: like the importance of climate action asap, how important it was for the average person to know what was at stake, and about how the most marginalized - predominantly black and brown communities - would be negatively impacted the most.
For me, the evening was significant. And bonus, I even got to catch up with a few Canadian female powerhouses who I know and admire, like Katie Telford and Mary Ng, just as an added reminder to chase my dreams - despite being a woman or WOC, and despite the expectations/limitations others had put on me.
The next morning I flew back to LA and scheduled a lunch date with my agent.
Within a few weeks, I was sitting across the table from a casting director of the National Geographic Channel. Two years later, I was accepted at my dream school, USC, to get my Masters Degree in Environmental Journalism. I would finally become the woman, and journalist I wanted to be. Because I was a Canadian living in the USA. And my storytelling would be more important than ever.
A snowy night in Ottawa, inside a landmark building I had driven by a million times, this journalist got confirmation on her purpose.
