As Democratic Institutions minister Karina Gould prepares to have her first child, the first sitting cabinet minister to give birth while in office, the issue of parental leave for MPs has come up yet again.  We've heard it a lot in the past couple of years NDP MPs Christine Moore and Niki Ashton have recently had children, as has Bloc MP Marilène Gill.  Like no time we've ever seen, we're seeing infants in the Chamber during Question Period and votes, and more spaces for childcare have been allocated in the Centre Block.

The issue of parental leave keeps coming up because it's not something that MPs are entitled to.  The reason why is pretty simple they don't pay into the Employment Insurance system, so they can't take advantage of it, which is mostly because MPs aren't employees.  And this is where the discussion needs to start, and to be reiterated constantly MPs aren't employees.  Parliament is not a "workplace."  And you can't equate this issue to how things happen in an ordinary workplace because you're comparing apples and goats.

Currently, the Parliament of Canada Act stipulates that MPs will start getting their wages docked if they miss more than 21 sitting days, but that clock stops if they can prove that they were ill or if they're engaged in service with the armed forces.  This is where the discussion around parental leave tends to lead, and the desire to amend the Act to put in that leave provision, but nobody wants to say how long it should be.  And this is one of those places where it gets sticky because the job of an MP requires one to be present in Ottawa to vote and to do the important things that MPs do, like participating in debates and attending committees, and being away for a protracted period of time isn't really an option.

Some MPs have missed very little time after giving birth.  Gill managed to time things so that she gave birth while Parliament wasn't sitting for several weeks, so she didn't wind up missing any sittings.  Ashton missed the whole of December (and Parliament does not sit for nearly all of January), while Gould plans to be away for the duration of March and April, which works out to about five or six sitting weeks, depending on when she comes back.  That may not sound like a lot, but it's quite a lot on the parliamentary calendar, during which she will miss the bulk of the debate around the budget some of the most important work of Parliament (though, as a cabinet minister, she is in the role of having to defend the spending as opposed to trying to hold government to account for it).  But we don't have a good sense of what a proper amount of time "should" be.

One point of comparison was the Ontario Municipal Act, which allows for up to 20 weeks of parental leave, which I would think would be unfathomable for Parliament (even though that may work out to ten sitting weeks, depending on the time of year).  Can you imagine missing the equivalent of half a year in a position that only lasts for four years under the current fixed election cycle?  I'm not sure that people quite understand the gravity of what such a proposal would be asking in a parliamentary context, particularly given that these MPs know that this is the reality they face when they make the decision to have a child while they're sitting MPs.

The discussion about how to make parliament a friendlier place to young families is also an ongoing one, but it's one that I think often misses some of the realities of what the situation really is.  For example, these young parents frequently complain that the daycare on Parliament Hill doesn't accept children under 18 months, and there was a proposal for an on-call babysitter for MPs (that they would pay out-of-pocket for), but without recognizing the logistical nightmare for that person (or people if there is sufficient demand) to not know from one day to the next how many children they are expected to care for, in a job that has irregular hours already because of the way the sitting calendar is spread out.  But never, in any of these conversations, has anyone mentioned the fact that these MPs have the resources and financial wherewithal to hire a nanny.  I wonder if this is because there is a reluctance to have this conversation because it sounds too elitist and they would rather an institutional fix to a perceived problem when they already have options and solutions that are out of reach of many Canadians.  While one supposes that there is a potential "optics problem" of an MP having a nanny, it should be countered with the fact that it's the most flexible solution for the job that we're asking MPs to do.

Which brings me to my final point MPs do have a job to do, and that job is in Ottawa, which is why the additional demands that MPs who have small children be allowed to work and vote remotely should be anathema in this conversation.  If we make it acceptable for MPs to start doing their work away from Ottawa, we will very quickly destroy the fabric of Parliament.  We've already seen what happens when attempts to make the institution more "family friendly" by doing things like eliminating evening sittings happened, which was to deal a severe blow to the collegiality of the institution because nobody dined together anymore.  If MPs start thinking they can vote remotely or attending committees by Skype or FaceTime instead of being there in person, what remains of collegiality will quickly be smothered because they'll no longer be interacting with one another in person, or meeting with witnesses at committees and making those important face-to-face connections or having conversations along the sidelines.

Because MPs will immediately start deciding that they have "really important work" to do in their ridings instead of being in Ottawa, the House of Commons will quickly be reduced to a small cadre who are forced to show up to fulfil quorum while everyone else stays home.  Yes, it's a slippery slope argument, but history is on my side on this one.  These MPs went into the job knowing that their job is in Ottawa, and even more to the point, they decided to have children with this fully in mind.  This was a conscious choice, and that's why we need to be very careful to limit what parental leave is on the table, before we trigger the eventual hollowing out of the institution.