Lawmaker's Tweet About Wife Shoveling Snow Goes Viral

Canadian lawmaker Jon Reyes is taking a lot of flak over a tweet he shared Saturday morning: "Even after a 12 hour night shift at the hospital last night, my wife still has the energy to shovel the driveway," he said, sharing a photo of Cynthia Reyes hard at work. "God bless her and all our frontliners. Time to make her some breakfast." Critics were quick to ask Reyes, Manitoba's Minister of Economic Development and Jobs, why he hadn't been out there shoveling snow himself, the CBC reports. Some noted that he had been up late the night before tweeting about the ATP Cup tennis tournament in Australia.

"Ladies, let the record show that this is not a depiction of every politician husband," tweeted Thomas Lukaszuk, a former politician in neighboring Alberta. Other critics called Reyes' tweet a prime example of how the Manitoba government has been "applauding healthcare workers while doing absolutely nothing to support them." Cynthia Reyes eventually weighed in to set the record straight, saying the snow had fallen overnight and she started clearing it before anybody else in the household was awake, the Washington Post reports. "All I wanted to do was shovel," she said in her first-ever tweet. In a lengthy Facebook post, she explained that shoveling snow early in the morning was a great way to "decompress" after a long shift.

"As many Manitobans and Canadians know, it’s a great workout, it allowed me to unwind, it’s refreshing after having worn an N95 mask almost the entire night, the weather was mild and it was quiet and peaceful," Cynthia Reyes wrote. She said the noise of the shoveling woke her husband up and he shared a photo because he was "surprised and impressed." "To us as a family we share different chores not based on any gender; but mostly on who is available to do it," she said, adding that "Jon loves cooking and I love shovelling and vice versa." She noted that the tweet "probably would not have gone viral if the gender roles were reversed, or if my husband were not a politician." (More Canada stories.)