Pierre Poilievre opens up about Valentina...

It's the most touching moment in his interview on Diary of a CEO.

Talking about your family in public when you are a public figure can be difficult. It doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter how much you love them, people will find a reason to attack, critique, be mean and your family are the collateral damage.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has recently, and perhaps reluctantly, begun to open up about the fact that his daughter Valentina is on the autism spectrum and is non-verbal.

Talking about family is difficult…

I stopped talking about and posting about my own family in any meaningful way more than a decade ago. It happened after I posted a funny video of one of my kids doing something they thought was hilarious and it brought out the haters on all sides.

So, I just stopped. It was nothing traumatic, I just didn’t want to deal with people attacking my family for their own personal political gain, so I stopped.

I’d been careful not to post personal details of my kids, I tried to protect their privacy. One of them did something funny, completely unrelated to politics and a massive argument errupted online about Harper and Trudeau and who was at fault and how my kid related to it.

To this day, I’m still careful.

I’ve been through a divorce that was painful, I’ve since remarried, but I don’t say much about it.

Why do I tell you this now?

To explain why Pierre Poilievre might have been reluctant to talk about his daugther Valentina in public. It’s not that he’s ashamed of her, it is that he has been protecting her and his family.

Valentina, if you haven’t heard, is Poilievre’s oldest child. She is autistic and non-verbal, which means there are extra challenges.

Extra joys as well, but extra challenges.

Autistic children bring joys and challenges…

Autistic kids are different. I say that as the father of two children living with autism though on different parts of the spectrum than Valentina - all of my children were verbal - but that didn’t mean communication was always easy.

Parents of children with autism want their kids to be “normal” in terms of being able to function in society, but they also know that these kids function and communicate in very different ways. At times it is frustrating and at times it is wonderful and beautiful.

I’ve never talked about this with Poilievre, perhaps I should. He met all my kids when they were younger, he was one of the local MPs that we would see at community events, but like most parents, I didn’t open up with here’s so and so and they are X.

It’s just part of who they are.

Pierre and his wife Ana are dealing with an extra layer in the fact that Valentina is non-verbal. As you will see in this clip from the Diary of a CEO podcast, he’s thinking about how to make sure she is looked after well after he is gone.

That’s what parents do.

A couple of days ago, Pierre posted an 8 minute clip from his two hour interview with Steven Bartlett from the Diary of a CEO Podcast - an interview that has been viewed1.3 million times just on YouTube.

The 8 minute clips was simply titled - This is Valentina.

Be prepared to be moved and to reach for a Kleenex.