Parti Quebecois MNA Veronique Hivon announced on Facebook Tuesday family comes first and she would not seek the party leadership in next year’s race.
Considered a frontrunner to replace former leader Jean-Francois Lisée, Hivon, 49, said her family needs her most, and that she cannot coexist in the “high-intensity” challenges of family and political leadership.
“The idea of taking up the challenge that requires the highest level of commitment in politics and bringing together these two levels of challenges of higher intensity, both personal and political, is simply not possible for me,” she wrote.
Hivon said, however, that her decision is not meant to suggest that balancing family and political life is impossible.
“I am a clear example of this having become a member of the National Assembly and mother 10 days apart, then minister, candidate for the leadership and deputy leadership always organizing my life in a way to try to maintain a certain balance,” she wrote.
Hivon was first elected in Joliette in 2008, and was reelected in three subsequent elections. She served as a cabinet minister under former PQ leader Pauline Marois, and was an opposition critic on the sensitive end-of-life legislation. Hivon lost her previous bid for the leadership to Lisée in 2016. She was then named deputy leader of the party.
Hivon wrote that she wanted to clarify her position before the2020 leadership race begins.
"It seems all the more important to me that I sit on a working committee in preparation for this congress and on the National Executive Council of the Party, whose meetings resume in the coming days. By expressing my decision today, the positions and proposals that I will defend in these instances can in no way be interpreted as those at the base of the positioning of a potential candidate for the leadership, but as those of a militant and from a Member of the National Assembly," she wrote.
