I'm not much of an expert on this subject, but having said that, I have recently, as a member of various boards of community or charitable organizations, had to attend a lot of meetings in this kind of format. I have actually done quite a number in the last few weeks, never mind the months before, because sometimes they have their meetings in this fashion.
By that, I mean they are like the one we have now, where you can see everybody on the screen or see their name, which in my view is quite an important part of this and would be very difficult, in my view, for sittings of the entire House. Having over 300 people on your screen is not going to work. It would be tricky, to say the least.
In thinking about this when I was asked to make some submissions on this subject, I thought the first thing I would say is that in my view this could work for committees, and I think it could work reasonably well. If a committee wants to have a meeting and consider legislation, they could have a meeting somewhere on Parliament Hill in one of the committee rooms with a few MPs present who happen to be in town or whatever, and then have all the others connected on one of these devices and continue a fairly normal meeting that way.
I say “fairly normal” because the chairman of the committee can see who is there, members can indicate by holding up their hand that they wish to speak next, which we do on some of the boards I sit on, and the chairman of the committee can recognize the person who wishes to ask a question or make a statement and then move on to the next, and so on through these proceedings.
However, in a meeting of the House of Commons, that is going to be extremely difficult when you have so many people potentially wanting to participate at different times and on different things, and where you are going to have votes that are going to have to be counted by somebody who can watch the pictures of the members and then get a vote. It's going to be a very complicated process, and not one that I think is going to be terribly helpful, but as some of the others have suggested in their comments, if we have a situation like the current health situation in the country, we need to be able to have Parliament continue to do at least some of its functions and to deal with important legislative matters. Maybe this is the only way to do it.
The other part of this that I'm particularly concerned about is how the Speaker is to choose from this kind of screen arrangement persons to speak and ask questions and all of that sort of thing. As I've said, in a committee where you have a fairly limited number of participants it's not so bad, but in the full House, how is the Speaker to know who is going to be next and from which party and all that sort of stuff?
Yes, in question period, we have an order by party and so on, but you would need to find out who is going to be the one asking the questions, and there are points of order that come up from time to time as well. How do you have a member indicate that he or she wishes to raise a point of order or a question of privilege and signal that to the Speaker in a way that might attract attention on a screen of this kind when you have that many possible people on the screen? It's going to be very difficult to catch this, I think, but I'm not an expert on this topic.