NDP MP Christine Moore attends to her daughter Daphnée, 7 months, in her office on Parliament Hill, April 13, 2016, in Ottawa.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
Where most women take a year, or even two years, off for maternity leave, Christine Moore, the NDP MP for Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Que., took two days.
Her daughter, Daphnée, was born on Sept. 8, in the middle of last year's lengthy election campaign, and Ms. Moore, 32, who was battling to win a second term in her expansive Northern Quebec riding, couldn't afford to take the time.
So she loaded up her baby in an RV and continued the campaign. She was re-elected – and maybe a little exhausted by the end of it all.
Back on Parliament Hill, Ms. Moore has to bring her daughter everywhere – Daphnée goes to committee; she often sleeps in her mother's arms during Question Period or sometimes joins in the hooting and hollering during the daily session.
"I try to avoid her crying or yelling, I cannot really control [it]," Ms. Moore said. "I try ... but sometimes it's really not easy."
There is a daycare on Parliament Hill, but it does not take infants, and so her Hill office is part adult working space and part baby playground.
Ms. Moore, the NDP's rural affairs critic, is figuring her way through the corridors of power, designed for men. Even now, only 26 per cent of MPs are women. There is no template for how to accommodate a baby in the parliamentary precinct.
She is leading the charge for some form of parental leave for MPs – who currently have none – so that future mothers can at least get a few more days than she did to recover from childbirth and, perhaps, bond with their babies.
"Ideally, it should last at least six months," she recently told the procedure and House affairs committee, which is investigating reforms to make the House of Commons more family friendly. "Leave would not mean that an MP would not work. It would rather mean putting in place a series of measures that would allow him or her to work from the riding. This would mean not having to come to Ottawa, and avoiding all the inconvenience of that."
Much work can be done on the Internet now, and surely there is a way to figure out voting remotely, she said, adding this would be a paid leave.
Ms. Moore said she expects Daphnée to be making the commute to Ottawa for a year. After that, her husband will take over the child care and Daphnée will remain in the riding.
Right now, she loads up her daughter on most Fridays and drives for eight hours back to her riding. On Monday, they are back on the road again – fall, winter and spring – returning to Ottawa. She has duplicates of everything – crib, clothes, playpen and high chair. "I am ready for twins," she laughed.
Ms. Moore also drives her car from her office in the Confederation Building, down a steep hill and west of the Centre Block, to the Commons. It's about a four-minute commute by car, but exhausting to be pushing a baby in a stroller up the hill, especially during Ottawa's bone-chilling winters.
There are little green buses that ferry MPs from their offices to the Centre Block, but Ms. Moore was refused entry the first time she tried to get on the bus with her baby. She insisted and got her way. She then appealed to the Speaker, who reserved several parking spots for pregnant MPs and MPs with babies – there is one space behind the Centre Block.
These are just incremental steps, underscoring how much more has to be done to make the Commons a place that is more attractive to younger women and men.
The committee, meanwhile, is hearing witnesses from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, as well as from former MPs and even the spouses of MPs. It is examining everything from changing voting and/or sitting hours to make work more compatible for politicians with families, to abolishing the half-day sitting on Fridays, would would enable MPs to get back to their ridings, be with their families and do more constituent work.
The committee hopes to have an interim report by June.
Sure enough, politics is creeping into this debate, especially over the issue of sitting only four days a week – as is done in other provincial legislatures, including Ontario. Currently, the House of Commons sits from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Fridays.
The opposition is resisting, suggesting the government would be the beneficiary of fewer sitting days. Michelle Warkentin, wife of Conservative MP Chris Warkentin, told the committee that Canadians expect "Question Period to take place five days a week during sitting weeks." If one session was taken away, she said, it would reduce members' advocacy and accountability.
Said Ms. Moore, "Eliminating Friday sittings would be to the advantage of the party in power because it often has to keep a large number of members here in order to avoid losing a vote, for instance, whereas opposition parties can generally have fewer members present on Fridays."