Work-life balance, misogyny, threats: an “extraordinary opportunity” turned into a burden for a counselor

Although she loved her four-year stint at Quebec City Hall, Councillor Maude Mercier Larouche decided not to pursue the adventure further. The daunting work-life balance and the harsh social tensions got the better of her willpower and energy.

"It's a job I love and an extraordinary opportunity that I'm glad I took, but it's not easy in the current social climate," confides the Saint-Louis-Sillery councilor, who says she's leaving primarily for family reasons. "When you receive a barrage of gratuitous and misogynistic insults, threats, and intimidation for announcements that are supposed to be good news, it can undermine your state of mind and affect your daily life."

Always the tram

As president of the Réseau de Transport de la Capitale (RTC) and responsible for major projects on the City's executive committee, ^Ms. Mercier Larouche has long acted as the standard-bearer for the province's "most polarizing" issue: the Quebec City tramway.

She admits to having seen it all in the two years she spent as a leading figure in the project before the Quebec government entrusted the mandate for the structuring transport network to the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec Infra.

She says she's had to file a police report in some extreme cases. "While investigating one of the cases, the investigator noticed that my home address had been circulating on certain social media groups. People were saying they wanted to come and dump things on my land."

A new wave of malice was heaped on Maude Mercier Larouche the first time the increase in the registration tax to finance public transport was mentioned.

"That evening, my phone was ringing off the hook and I received messages with terms so appalling that they cannot be written in the media."

Family repercussions

Like many other politicians who agreed to testify in this case, the collateral effects on her family were the last straw for the president of the Sainte-Foy borough.

"Once my teenage daughter came home crying because someone at school showed her a video montage of me saying things that made no sense," she says, without wanting to elaborate too much on the still-sensitive subject of work-family balance.

Privileged

Despite what she had to endure, Maude Mercier Larouche would still encourage her own daughters to enter municipal politics.

"I consider myself privileged. It's an extraordinary adventure and it's a source of pride to take on issues you believe in. [...] We feel like we're helping, that we're improving people's daily lives. It's an opportunity that will always exist, despite the hatred and challenges associated with it on a daily basis," she concludes.