Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 29th, 2020

[Nathalie Laliberté]

Yes, when we have the interpreters interpreting remote participants, we need to increase the team's strength. Normally, on average—it varies depending on the type of assignment—an interpreter in a normal setting will do it for about six hours. With remote interpretation, it's much harder for them to do it. It increases the cognitive load, so on average they will do about four hours instead of six, and we bring in more teams of people to do the work.

In addition to that, we've added on site a coordinator who is also an interpreter and who will deal with the technical issues with the technicians and make sure that the interpreters get all of the documentation so that it's much easier for them to do their work. In summary, the interpreters do a shorter time in the booth, we have coordinators and we—

Yes?

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

What challenges has that created, if any? Has it created challenges for the interpreters? Have there been more sick days or challenges in how they are holding up? There's obviously only a limited number of professionals who are qualified to do this work, so I wanted to see what kind of impact it has had on them.

[Nathalie Laliberté]

Thank you for raising that point.

I have to say that the conditions are difficult for the interpreters. Some interpreters have reported incidents, saying that after assignments they have headaches, earaches and fatigue. There were no incidents related to acoustic shock or injury requiring medical assistance, but it's much harder on the interpreters to do their work because the sound varies with the connections of the participants. They really have to concentrate harder.

I'm not an interpreter by trade, and I really admire the work of my team, because what they do is that they listen to the participant and then in their head they have to analyze, translate the information and put it into the other language in a flow that works, and they speak on top of that. They do all of that at the same time, so really, the cognitive load of what they have to do is extremely difficult in normal circumstances, and when it's remote, it's even harder.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

That's about all the time we have, Mr. Richards.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Okay. No problem.

Thanks, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Mr. Gerretsen.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Moseley, I've been dying to ask you this since we started this meeting. Is that a real or virtual background?

You're on mute.

Do you know how to use the platform?

[Harry Moseley]

I did some training earlier today.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Harry Moseley]

Luckily...

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I think you said it's a virtual background.

[Harry Moseley]

That's a virtual background. I can put up other virtual backgrounds if you want me to.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

No, my time is limited.

My question for you is what is the minimum required Internet speed for Zoom to function properly?

[Harry Moseley]

That's a great question. Thank you.

Madam Chair, a great part of our technology is our technology architecture, which is radically different. When a meeting starts on Zoom, like this meeting, it's held in one of our 17 global data centres around the world. Now I would like to be clear with respect to the Canadian House of Commons: Your meetings and all of your data are all resident in Canada in two data centres, Vancouver and Toronto. None of your data is ever held outside. Saying it differently, everything for Canada's House of Commons is inside Canada and not outside.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

And the security?

[Harry Moseley]

I'll come to your question. It has to be explained.

When that meeting happens, it connects to each of the end points, and we handle that network connection discretely end point by end point. We can tolerate what's called a 45% packet loss and still have a fantastic experience because we always prioritize the audio over video over content. We handle really poor networks in extraordinarily good circumstances.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

In the earlier panel we talked a lot about Internet connectivity in rural parts of the country. We heard some numbers about people getting 8 megabytes per second here or there, and so on and so forth. Do you have an actual number for the minimum number of megabytes per second required for Zoom to work properly?

[Harry Moseley]

I don't, but we can certainly get that.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Yes, if you could.

Mr. Weigelt, do you have any information on your Microsoft Teams platform in terms of connectivity?

[John Weigelt]

Well, we see access to connectivity as being a challenge across Canada, and it's one of the things that's critically important for us as a company. We have our Airband project that is looking to reach out and provide connectivity options where there is no access. We're quite proud that we have 2,500 people using Teams out of Nunavut and being able to get exceptional services over a satellite link. Our key concern is around what we call “latency”. It's that delay, that lag, between the beginning and the end of a conversation. As was indicated with the other tool sets, we make sure that we prioritize the voice conversation first, and then we are able to manage across what we call “disadvantaged links”.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I can appreciate that you don't have an exact number either, but if we could get from both of you some kind of breakdown information on what Internet speed is required to have a decent connection....

Full disclosure, I was a computer engineer. That was my original training. I can appreciate that it's very complex and not as simple as just giving me a number like that, but if we could get some info on that, it would be great.

Madame Laliberté, you had some extremely good points about translation and how this is going to work. This committee right now is tasked, to my understanding at least, with how we can have a virtual parliament in the short term in light of COVID-19. If we were to design something that was going to last over a much longer time, I think we could really drill down to get to the core issues of what is required in terms of what you were asking. But if there were one thing or a couple of things that are really necessary to make this work in the short term, given the situation that we're in right now, what improvements could be made?

[Nathalie Laliberté]

I would say that the most important thing is that people wear a headset. We've done a lot of tests over the last few years, and even more over the last few weeks, and the quality of sound is much better when people wear their headset. This is of prime importance, though—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Sorry, but if we were to make one of our recommendations that headsets be mandatory, your organization would support that, obviously.

[Nathalie Laliberté]

Yes.