Pierre Poilievre Keeps Talking about Women's Biological Clocks. He Should Stop

How do you feel when you hear the phrase “biological clock”? Do you feel your ovaries shrivelling and dying as the seconds tick by? Or maybe a hot flash of anger directed at any male politician who obsesses about the fertility of females?

The backlash against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s frequent invocation of women “desperate” to have children but stymied by the high cost of housing has set off a predictable skirmish in the ever-present culture wars. Liberal and NDP politicians have accused him of using “outdated and harmful rhetoric,” while Poilievre supporters have complained that criticism is “political correctness run amok.”

Talking about women or young couples who are delaying having kids because they can’t afford to buy a home isn’t all that strange. It is something people in their 20s and 30s think about, and it’s the reason I moved into a housing co-op in my mid-20s, a few years before having my first child. I have neighbours who have told me they chose to have a second baby only after getting secure, affordable housing. I can easily imagine people speaking to Conservative politicians and campaign volunteers about this issue on the doorstep.

But it’s important to put the language Poilievre has been using in the context of what’s been happening within the world of right-wing and conservative politics.

Over the past decade far-right ideas and rhetoric have become more popular and mainstream, often promoted and consumed by a young, male audience in the form of podcasts and social media videos.

During a standard Poilievre stump speech, you’ll hear a mix of traditional Conservative talking points around lower taxes and government waste mixed in with references to popular far-right figures and ideas. A lengthy part of the speech explaining how government spending leads to higher inflation usually goes over like a lead balloon. But name-checking the far-right social media personality Jordan Peterson gets cheers, and so does a promise to never participate in the supposedly nefarious World Economic Forum — a reference to a popular online conspiracy theory.

When Poilievre appeared in an hour-long interview on Jordan Peterson’s podcast and YouTube channel in January, he said that young people are yearning to start families and practise “traditional values.”

Peterson has promoted traditional heterosexual marriage as a cure for much of what ails young men, has criticized “pathological guys who are out there bolstering up the feminists” and recently released a video lecture series on studying the Bible.

“That’s the thing I'm finding, is that a lot of people are really getting back to those values that we were told were unfashionable,” Poilievre told Peterson. “Young people today, they want to have families.”

In response, Peterson observed that “there’s been a real conservative swing, especially among young men.”

A few minutes after those comments, a religious anti-abortion ad plays, telling the story of a woman in “a tumultuous marriage” who already had eight children and was considering ending her ninth pregnancy before reconsidering because “this was the baby she’d asked God for.” The advertisement is not a generic YouTube ad: it includes a promo code for Peterson’s show.

Abortion is still legal in Canada and continues to be treated as a political third rail: although individual politicians may have strongly held beliefs, there is no desire to reopen the issue, especially on the campaign trail.

But in the United States, the court ruling that paved the way for legal abortion, Roe v. Wade, was overturned in 2022, leading to draconian laws in several states limiting or banning abortion.

While opposing abortion and emphasizing traditional gender roles have played a part in religious right-wing politics for years, baby-making is getting a futurist spin as well.

The concept of “pronatalism” has been popularized by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech CEO who holds a highly influential place in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. Musk has fathered 14 children with several different women, and the idea of having a lot of kids — which sometimes includes trying to select embryos for the best traits — is currently popular in Silicon Valley tech culture.

It’s also something Vice-President JD Vance has alluded to, calling for an increase in the birth rate and criticizing “childless cat ladies” who are supposedly “miserable.”

Critics say pronatalism is often associated with eugenics and a desire to populate the world with more of the “right people.” Eugenics, a concept popular in the first few decades of the 20th century, argued people with some genetic qualities should be encouraged to have children, while others should be discouraged or blocked. It has been discredited because of its associations with racism, ableism, white supremacy and practices like forced sterilization.

Poilievre currently has a problem with women: a March 31 Leger poll found that 36 per cent of male respondents picked Poilievre as the best choice for prime minister, but that dropped to just 22 per cent of women. The same poll showed that 38 per cent of men picked Liberal Leader Mark Carney as the best choice for prime minister, compared with 36 per cent of women.

Comedian Clare Blackwood, who took aim at Poilievre’s comments in a video published Friday, had a suggestion for an alternative way to discuss the issue of high housing costs.

“Instead of saying... that you ‘feel for the 39-year-old woman, desperate to have kids but unable to buy a home in which to raise them, her biological clock running out,’” Blackwood advised, “you just say, ‘I’m going to lower housing costs.’”