What if Poilievre’s priority is family?
There were a lot of people left chasing parts of their jaws across the floors of the Canadian political twitterverse Wednesday afternoon when word trickled out that Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre would not be running for leadership of the party after all.
The shock and surprise quickly morphed into sneering, mockery and derision when Poilievre put out a statement suggesting that a big part of his reason for bailing was a reluctance to miss more of his young daughter’s life than he already had.
It is fair to say that, within the margin of error, no one believed him. “Did he just realize that he has a one-yearold?” was a typical snark. “Yet another scurrilous politician suddenly discovering a desire to spend time with his family” was another sharp remark rendered dull by hundreds of people making it. Others pointed out that he was known to be hugely ambitious, and ambitious guys like him don’t give two seconds’ thought to their families.
If there was a common denominator to it all, it was that Poilievre is not super well- liked. He’s a notorious partisan who is widely seen as a major player in helping reduce question period to the level of schoolyard taunts and fratboy antics.
And so the gleeful subtext — heck, even just the text — of the sneering is the sense that there’s a less wholesome reason he decided not to run, and hopefully it has something to do with some ethically challenged skeletons beating on the door of his closet.
There’s no question the timing was weird. By all accounts Poilievre seemed to be all in on the leadership, right up until the moment he wasn’t. He’d been doing the rounds of the TV shows showing off his French, the robocall campaign was underway, he’d been lining up caucus support as late as Wednesday morning, the hall was booked for his official announcement, and so on. So yes, it’s a bit surprising that he pulled the chute as late as he did.
But in the absence of a strong reason to think otherwise, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on this. Why? Because ambition is like puppy love — it has a way of blinding you to the downsides of the object of your desire right up until you absolutely can’t ignore it.
In December, the venture capitalist and essayist Paul Graham posted a piece on his blog that talked about how, before he had kids, he was afraid of having kids. Parenting looked like a lot of work, other peoples’ kids seemed like terrors, and you couldn’t be a parent and be cool. What changed for him, obviously, was that he had kids, “and something I had dreaded turned out to be wonderful.”
So far so typical — this is the standard emotional arc people trace as they go from not having kids to having them. But then he continues: “I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it.”
I squirmed when I read that, and lots of men, upon reading that line just now, probably squirmed a bit, too. But as Graham puts it, “if there weren’t something real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you’re probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself.”
All of which speaks to why I’m inclined to take Poilievre’s account at face value. Is it really so crazy to think that after yet another long day working at the toxic coal face of partisan politics, he came home one night last week, spent an hour or so rolling on the floor with his daughter and thought to himself, “I could use a bit more of this, and a bit less of that?”
But beyond the question of Poilievre’s motivations and ambitions, there’s a broader point here about the state of gender relations, the persistence of the wage gap between men and women, and rising complaints about the burden of emotional labour at home still being borne largely by women.
We’re at an interesting cultural moment when even as women are being encouraged to lean in, men are being increasingly urged to take things like work- life balance seriously. If this is something we actually want, maybe we could start by not sneering at men who do.
THERE’S NO QUESTION THE TIMING WAS WEIRD.