Another day, another attempt to manufacture outrage by Canada’s conservative media ecosystem.
This time, it’s the prime minister’s two-week summer break, one that has outlets like True North. tweeting: “Amid concerns about a looming recession in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is hitting the beaches of Costa Rica for a two-week vacation, with taxpayers paying for much of it.”
Even major outlets like the Canadian Press, global news and the CBC they are treating your decision to take a well-earned break as legitimate news. If there’s anything positive about this latest apparent outrage, it’s that we’ve stopped talking about the prime minister’s haircut.
Family vacations have long played a starring role in Trudeau’s narrative. But the unrelenting focus on how and where he spends his private time – and yes, prime ministers deserve to have some of that too – is more than just the media’s inability to take its eyes off him. It’s also another red flag for anyone considering running for public office, especially if he has young children.
In August 2016 part by policy options, Jennifer Ditchburn pointed to the contrast between the attention paid to the Trudeau family vacations and broader conversations about the importance of work-life balance. This problem is not unique to Liberal prime ministers: “Anyone who has worked in or around politics knows what life is like,” Ella Ditchburn wrote. “There is no real free time, the BlackBerry is always on, there is always someone asking for something. Keeping marriages together is difficult.”
On some level, this is understandable. Politics is a high-stress, high-pressure job, and there are many other professions that charge a similar price. But while other careers and workplaces have made steps toward a better work-life balance, politics and public life have likely regressed over the past decade. This is due to the growing influence of social media, which can make it almost impossible for elected officials to unplug and decompress like they used to, and need to.
The challenge here, well one of them, is that gaining sympathy for elected officials is only slightly less difficult than trying to increase the popularity of colonoscopies. A member of parliament earns $185,800, has paid staff and travel and can earn a very generous pension with just six years of service. Of course, this is the job they signed up for, even if they didn’t necessarily understand how demanding it could be. Of all the problems in the world, the mental health of politicians ranks lowest on the list.
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But there is a cost here that we all pay, and it comes in the form of elected bodies that do not accurately represent the population at large. As of the last election, just over 30 per cent of parliamentarians were women, a proportion that puts Canada in 59 place globally. This isn’t just a bad thing if you’re a self-styled feminist (or “woke up,” as conservatives love to say these days). It is also bad if you are a participating member of society and want to see less inequality and more justice.
As has been documented time and time again, having more women in elective positions would result in better and more representative decision-making. or as by vox sarah kiff wrote in 2017, “Women legislators are more likely to introduce legislation that specifically benefits women. They are better at returning funds to their home districts. And, to put it bluntly, they just get more done: A female legislator, on average, passed twice as many bills as a male legislator in a recent session of Congress.”
They also have to deal with a whole range of deterrents that their male colleagues don’t have. Like the late Anne Kingston wrote in 2019: “Women politicians continue to be hampered by systemic bias, sexism, and double standards, whether in media coverage, threats of violence, and hateful online trolling.” It is not hard to see how excessive focus on how political leaders spend time with their family would only add to this lopsided burden. “One wonders what message women interested in federal politics got from coverage of the Trudeau family vacation (to Tofino, BC, in 2016),” Ditchburn wrote in her policy options part. “Maybe ‘Don’t even think about taking time off with your kids.'”
Opinion: If we want to make sure our elected bodies look like the public they were created for, we need to stop punishing the people in them for having private lives that include children and families, writes columnist @maxfawcett. #Trudeau
If we want to ensure that our elected bodies resemble the public they were created to serve, we must stop punishing the people in them for having private lives that includes children and families. And if we want to avoid being filled with politicians and professional masochists, we must be willing to give those elected officials a break from time to time.
That means allowing them, including our prime ministers, to take vacations from time to time. Regardless of their partisan fringes, they have more than earned it.