Parliament and Parenthood
As the newly elected class of 2025 prepares to take their seats in Parliament, many for the first time, they will face the reality of balancing public service and family. Last Friday, just before the election, I sat on the “Parliament and Parenthood” panel at the Canadian Study of Parliament Group seminar on ‘an Inclusive Parliament’ in Ottawa and offered the following remarks.
(Note: several of the slides used are not included here for size; links are used instead where applicable.)
Good morning,
Thank you for the invitation to be here to discuss parliament and parenthood.
It sounds like such a simple topic, yet it is far more complex and personal than you might expect. Rather than talking about it philosophically or as a policy paper, I’ll just tell you our story.
There is a public expectation that Members of Parliament are family folk. Having young kids is a huge political advantage. You have all heard clichés about politicians kissing babies.
But it conflicts with the expectation that those in public life are superhumans capable of being everywhere at all times, instantly available to attend meetings and events, where the very act of taking time to be with your family is sometimes met with derision and negative press.
There is no pretending that the public and pundit class treat men with kids the same as women with kids. No news article ever described me as “David Graham, father,” or talked about the effect of my wife being pregnant during my year-long nomination campaign, or questioned my ability to balance my working, family, and campaign life in the year between my nomination and my election.
There’s a societal expectation that Mom will deal with the baby, and only when Mom is the one in office does the question even get asked.
In my case we were fortunate in many ways.
Our first child was born in the spring of 2014, nearly a year into my nomination campaign and more than a year before the election. She was born in the same room of the same hospital and came home to the same house as I had.
We had moved from Ottawa back in with my parents, into the same house in which I grew up in the riding in which I intended to run, and we had their support and involvement every step of the way. I can’t think of a more vivid image of what it looks like to combine family and politics than this picture with my wife and daughter on one side, my parents on the other, and Justin Trudeau in the middle, shortly after my nomination.
My nearly-20,000 square-kilometre rural riding was very close to Ottawa. From our home in the riding to our apartment near Parliament Hill was just about exactly two hours, and there was no alternative to driving back and forth. Getting to an airport would take as long as just driving to the Hill, and taking the bus, which I did only once, was an all-day affair.
I met my wife in Ottawa. Our first date was a private tour of Parliament Hill, where I had already been working as a political staffer for a couple of years.
It meant that my family could travel with me nearly every week between our home and Parliament. With no flights to be booked, we did not run into problems with the limited travel points available to family members.
My daughter spent her formative years in the Halls of Parliament, but she was absolutely the exception because of the unique circumstances we had that allowed it.
I had colleagues with several young children who lived in other timezones. With a total of 64 travel points for the year for their own, their staff’s, and each member of their family’s travel, it meant that, while I could bring my family to Ottawa every week, most could only bring their families to Ottawa once or twice in a year.
It was not until the fall of 2019 that my daughter began kindergarten and we had to start considering whether she should do so in the riding, where I spent my weekends and Parliamentary recesses, or in the Ottawa area, where I would be spending most of the school year.
Doing so in the capital region would mean changing our address to our small Gatineau apartment, and no longer being officially a resident of the riding I represented, which itself has political consequences. There is no provision in our education system for a student to be able to concurrently attend two different schools depending on where they are that day or that week, which would help MPs, split households, and anyone else who both regularly travels and wants to see their kids.
That fall, she started kindergarten in the riding. Parliament was not sitting due to the federal election, giving us a stay of execution to make the long term decision of where to send her – and it became completely moot when I was defeated a month later.
With the intense 80-plus hour weeks typical for Members of Parliament, there is no balance between family time and work time unless you include your children in your work, and my family often accompanied me to community events across the territory. We drove an average of 65,000 km/year during my time in office, most of it all together.
The divorce rate among MPs is far higher than the public average. More to the point, what family time there is, is often very dramatically shared with the public.
In 1987, Sheila Copps very famously was the first Canadian MP to give birth while in office. When she breastfed her newborn in the House of Commons, her adversaries tried to have her kicked out on the grounds that eating is not permissible in the Chamber.
During my time in office 30 years later, several MPs had babies while sitting and simple natural tasks like breastfeeding had finally become somewhat normalized.
On the other hand, in 2018, Calgary MP Tom Kmiec had a baby while in office who lived only 39 days. His grief was very public. Even in a country that largely respects the separation of politics from their families, genuine privacy is fleeting.
Through my entire term, I sat on the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. In the first year of our mandate, we studied the question of a Family Friendly Parliament.
Our study took only a few months, with PROC report number 11 being tabled in the House in June of 2016. The House did not get around to concurring in the report until April of 2017, most of a year later.
In our deliberations, it was clear that there is no aspect of serving in federal office that is family friendly. It is an inherently soulless and impersonal job that eats its participants alive.
We discussed ways to make things better, such as having remote or hybrid sittings and electronic voting, but we could not reach a consensus as a committee. Some Members demanded that all votes be not only in person, but should be standing votes, insisting that the public had the right to see their Members of Parliament rising from their seats to take a position on each issue.
The idea that we could sit in Parliament and not actually be there was anathema to many.
One thing we all agreed on was that leaving the Hill to take a parental leave was already physically possible; its consequences are political, not directly financial. Being a Member of Parliament requires you to be everywhere, all the time. In the eyes of the public, you are either here, now, in front of them, or you are nowhere at all. If you take a leave of absence from this very public role, you are disappearing from public view and hurting your prospects for re-election. Your bosses are, after all, your voters.
We discussed taking parental leave. But the reality is that, while there are paper rules around showing up, Members of Parliament have no enforceable attendance policy as it is.
MPs who miss working 21 sitting days in a session are penalized at a rate of $120/day. We had to fill out a “Statement of Attendance” form once a month stating how many days of work we had missed and send it to financial services, however there were a few exceptions that would allow a Member to miss a sitting day, including “public or official business,” which covers pretty much everything MPs do.
MPs are salaried and largely masters of their own schedules. In practice, leave from the Hill is a question for party whips ensuring that House Duty and committee are covered with enough bodies at any given time, rather than a philosophical question for the human beings behind the titles.
In PROC’s 97th report, tabled in the House, just before Parliament rose in 2019, we hastily recommended a simple means of providing parental leave after a single meeting. It would provide for Members of Parliament to be deemed to have been present in Parliament leading up to and for a period after having a child, meaning they could not be penalised, under the already-meaningless attendance policy, for becoming parents.
Meaningless because it is “unparliamentary”, according to House of Commons Procedure and Practice, to refer to the presence or absence of another Member in the House. It is against the rules to put on the record that someone is not there and you cannot assume that if someone missed a vote that they were therefore not off performing official duties somewhere else, so there is no enforcement mechanism.
COVID, of course, changed everything. There is no more efficient vector to spread a communicable disease to every community in the country than to have Members of Parliament spend the weekends meeting as many people as they can in their communities, then all travel to the same location to spend the weekdays meeting with each other, sharing ideas – and germs.
What in 2016 was unacceptable to many Members of Parliament became essential to them in 2020. Hybrid sittings, allowing many Members of Parliament to participate, speak, and vote from home, changed the game completely.
Through outside forces well beyond their control, Parliament finally took meaningful steps to become slightly more family friendly.
When I was in office, my wife told me that we could not have another child because I did not have time for the one we already had.
I worked seven days a week, always either on the Hill or in the community, never at home. Our time together was in the car, shared with the community rather than with each other.
My relationship with my daughter felt almost as if it worked on the basis of scheduled appointments.
I lost my bid for reelection in 2019 and for the first time I was able to step back and ask myself what had just happened to me over those very intense four years. I had gained 60 pounds in office. Since starting my campaign, we had driven the distance from the Earth to the Moon together, and we had little to show for it. I decided, right there on election night, that I was done running for the foreseeable future. There is no automatic golden parachute and the whole question of money in politics and all its aspects needs a conference all of its own.
In 2020 we moved to Alberta for me to chase another of my passions, where I took a decidedly non-political job as a rail traffic controller. Last year, we moved again, this time to New Brunswick, for me, after years in government, to continue keeping the trains running on time in the role of a trainmaster.
It wasn’t until 2023, four years after I left office, that we finally had our second child, nine years after the first.
In consideration of the impact on my family of my time in office, and what I saw in the lives of my colleagues who lived as far from the Hill as we now do, that was the primary driver for me to not run again in this current election, as much as, from a policy and public service point of view, I very much would have liked to return to serve in Parliament at this critical time in our nation’s history, in this Monday’s election.
But at the end of the day, Parliament is no place to raise a family, and my family must come first.