Pandemic resets work-life balance for MPs
Ability to work remotely could make it easier to recruit female candidates
Mélanie Joly is spending a lot of time lately telling women — and herself — that motherhood and politics can mix.
In addition to her job as regional economic minister in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Joly has also been asked to recruit candidates to run for the Liberals in the next election.
Joly, as it happens, is very personally invested in the idea that motherhood shouldn’t be an obstacle to a political career like hers. For several months now, this Quebec cabinet minister has been going through fertility treatments, hoping to become a mom at age 42 and add a child to the life she now shares with partner Félix Marzell, owner of a Montreal-based design firm.
“It’s my own struggle right now because I’m trying to have a family,” Joly said in an interview. With four in-vitro treatments to date, “I’m getting better results. So yeah, I’m optimistic.”
Joly hasn’t been all that public about her desire to become a parent, which goes back “years,” she says, and finally sent her to seek the fertility treatments this year.
But the issue of whether politics is open to parents of young children is much on her mind these days — as a candidate recruiter and as a mother-inwaiting herself.
Oddly enough, the pandemic figures largely in that thinking, in that it has helped prove that politicians don’t need to be in Ottawa all the time to do their jobs.
“It will be something that women from all parties and parents will have to stand for, to make sure that we have a family-friendly House of Commons,” Joly says “We can’t have that go back to ‘normal.’ ”
It has indeed been one of the rare silver linings of the pandemic for the elected class — women and men, across party lines, juggling political work with family life in a way most haven’t done before.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole talked about this very thing when he sat down with the Star’s editorial board earlier this year and was asked how the pandemic had changed him.
“I realize how much my political career had had me away from my children,” O’Toole said, calling the work-from-home reality of COVID-19 as a “small little grace that we get from this pandemic … It’s changed me in that regard. I’m much more aware; of trying to be a better parent.”
In normal times, the only time voters got to see politicians with their children was when the kids got hauled up on the election-night stage or in the annual holiday cards, or, in very rare cases, in the arms of new mothers in the Commons. International Development Minister Karina Gould, Joly’s cabinet colleague, was one of the more prominent and recent examples, in 2018 becoming the first cabinet minister to have a baby while in office.
But virtual Parliament has shone a light into MPs living their lives at home, kids and all. Toronto MP Nate Erskine-Smith was seen casting a vote early in the pandemic while tucking his child into bed, and toddlers have wandered into the frame in all kinds of meetings of the Commons and committees.
Joly sees this as a very healthy development. “We need to make sure that we’ve learned from this pandemic and that we make sure that not only are we talking about work-life balance, but using the tools to make sure that it’s happening,” she says.
More than a decade ago, another prominent woman politician was having similar thoughts. In a major speech at the Chateau Laurier hotel in 2010, former cabinet minister Belinda Stronach laid out the case for a more family-friendly Commons through digital technology.
Stronach at this point was long out of the political game, mainly because she felt that her children, then entering their teenage years, needed a mother who wasn’t juggling a weekly commute to Ottawa for five days at a time.
When the Equal Voice organization convened a lunch in her honour a couple of years after her departure from politics, Stronach used the occasion to argue for some serious modernization of the democratic machinery.
“I think we should consider some radical adjustments to the way that Parliament does its business,” Stronach said. “We could, for example, institute video-conferencing and afford people the option to participate in committees or caucus meetings by video-conferencing. We now have the reliable technology and it’s used elsewhere, all the time, for distance work.”
Seen through the prism of the pandemic, Stronach’s 11-yearold speech now seems almost prophetic.
“We could even put in place electronic distance voting in the House. This would allow a greater number of women and men to feel more able to balance family and public service.”
Equal Voice commissioned some research from Abacus Data a few years ago to find out, in part, what continued to stand in the way of greater participation of women in elected politics. The biggest factor by far, Abacus found, was women’s fear that politics would just cost them too much time away from their families.
Joly says that when she approaches women to run for office, it’s never just one call. Men are generally far more receptive to a cold call initially, she says, but women require much more persuasion. “This is the first conversation,” Joly has become accustomed to saying to her potential female recruits. “We’ll have many.”
Sarah Eves is one of those Liberal candidates-to-be who required a lot of conversations before getting nominated in the riding of Central Okanagan–Similkameen–Nicola. Once this teacher from Merritt, B.C. started to catch the political bug a couple of years ago, it still took many discussions with Liberals — cabinet ministers Marco Mendicino and Carla Qualtrough, to name two — before she was ready to take the plunge.
And yes, seeing how politics is working during the pandemic played a part in her deliberations, too. One of Eves’ main concerns revolved around all the travel required, which is a particularly difficult challenge for MPs who have to commute long distances to Ottawa week after week. Anyone who becomes the MP for this large, urban/rural riding has to first navigate roads that can be treacherous in winter, even before getting on that long flight from Vancouver to the capital.
“Obviously I’m still going to have to go to Ottawa,” Eves says about the prospect of running — and winning, if that happens. (The riding is currently held by Conservative MP Dan Albas.)
“Of course I’m going to travel and see people, but if the weather turns, does it make sense?” Thanks to the pandemic Parliament, Eves said, people have become a lot more comfortable with online encounters with politicians. “It’s really easy to switch and people would be quite happy if I said, ‘You know what? Look, there’s a snowfall warning coming. Let’s all just put this meeting online,’ and people are OK with that.”
Eves, who is also mother to three nearly grown children, ranging in age from 16 to 22, has been doing most of the legwork of her rookie candidacy through Zoom. She holds about six “meet and greet” online sessions per month with a dozen or so voters at a time, while also using Zoom sessions to co-ordinate her band of volunteers.
Joly has been doing almost all her candidate recruitment virtually, too, and believes the Liberals are getting close to the target of 50 per cent women on the slate in the next election. She hasn’t been to Ottawa since December, doing all her cabinet work at long-distance. Joly fully expects that if the fertility treatments are successful, she’ll continue working a lot from home in the future, even when pandemic restrictions are lifted.
Those medical appointments are among the few things that Joly is still doing in person during the pandemic, in what has become a large family project. “Many, many” conversations with her spouse led to this path. “We want to have a family and we’ll have a family,” Joly says.
Her mother often accompanies her to the clinic and her father is cheering her on. Joly wasn’t sure how he would react, but she says her dad’s words of encouragement echoed what she herself is telling to wouldbe women politicians.
“Well, you know, Mélanie, this is the battle. You’re a woman of your time. Now you’re able to have it all — try, go ahead. You can do both.”