Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 30th, 2020

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

My next question is for Ms. Davies, but the other witnesses are welcome to answer it as well.

I know that some parliaments have extended their hours in order to hold more sittings. If I understand correctly, you sit about once a week. Do you and the members feel that's enough for the moment to ensure accountability?

[Siwan Davies]

I think to begin with that members were keen to continue proceedings. When other legislatures were not meeting at all and were suspended or adjourned, we continued to meet.

Now that it has proved to work technologically and procedurally, there is increased pressure from members to meet, and as I mentioned earlier, as a response we are now having meetings of committees and plenary, not just plenary.

I think, as our Llywydd said when asked, it's not how you would prefer to be conducting things. One would prefer to have all the proceedings as usual but it's as much as we can do to support proceedings at all in the current environment.

I think there will always be pressure from members to have an increase in business as there is during normal times. There is pressure from many members for more sittings and pressure from others for fewer. But to answer your question, yes, less time is being spent on assembly business than there would have been. However, we are perhaps more concentrated and focused on the scrutiny of the government in relation to COVID-19 and to our legislative functions.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you so much.

My next question is for Mr. McCowan. It's about the discussions among members, which unfortunately aren't translated, so they aren't bilingual. That makes it a little harder for unilingual francophones to follow the discussions and for unilingual anglophones to understand French questions and answers.

I'd like to know if efforts will be made to make the briefings more bilingual.

[Ian McCowan]

Thank you for the question. Obviously, it's critical to going forward that whatever path is found does respect the country's official languages.

In terms of exactly what form that takes, I would defer to the work your committee is doing. I think the House, quite rightly, has asked your committee to fashion some suggestions. The question that you pose, I think, goes to the heart of how the House organizes itself and its business. I would respectfully defer to the deliberations of your group in terms of how best to address that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Okay. That's all the time we have.

Next up is Ms. Blaney.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Hello, everyone. It's amazing that we're meeting together in this way all across the planet. Thank you so much for being here.

My first question will go to Mr. Hamlyn.

One thing we've had discussions about, particularly in our meeting yesterday, was how to make sure that, when we're meeting in camera virtually, we have the ability to protect our members. Are you doing any work to make sure that in camera meetings and the content of their information are kept safe?

[Matthew Hamlyn]

I assume we are talking about in camera meetings of committees because our plenary chamber, obviously, does not meet in camera.

It's a really live issue. The strong advice from our parliamentary information authority, who are the people who look after our information security, digital and physical, strongly advised the Speaker and the Lord Speaker that private meetings of committees, or indeed any confidential business, should be conducted using Microsoft Teams, which is regarded as much more secure than some of the other video conferencing systems, like Zoom. We're using Zoom for our broadcasting. We are using Microsoft Teams for private meetings of committees. That's inconvenient for committees, which have to switch between different platforms between private and public, but that's the very strong advice we have had. That's been endorsed by the Speaker.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Mr. Hamlyn, you mentioned that all parties are collaborating. I think that here in Canada all of us can see there is a sense of collaboration among parties as we negotiate this very challenging time. One concern I have is that right now we're in a minority government. If we were in a majority government, I'm not sure whether those processes would roll out in the same way.

Could you speak to what that collaboration looks like and how we could keep that collaboration safe, regardless of whether we were in a minority or a majority Parliament?

[Matthew Hamlyn]

That's a very good question.

In Westminister, we have a government with a majority of 80, having had quite a long period of minority government. This has meant, obviously, that at the end of the day if the government wanted certain changes to procedure, it could get them. The government could table the relevant motion and force it through. That's not been the approach. There's been a lot of very thorough consultation between parties.

It is noticeable, to give a very live example, in the testing, which a colleague mentioned earlier, of our electronic remote voting. We've been doing that. We've been trying to reach out to members to ensure as many as possible take part. We've been collaborating very closely with the whips of all the main parties to ensure that happens. They've all been very happy to help. Obviously, it's in their interest, as whips, to make sure that members are able to vote.

I think that so far it's gone well. We may see difficulties as pressure builds, as I think Siwan mentioned earlier. As members want more and more business to be done, if we start saying we have a limited capacity, the opposition will say to the government it would like some opposition time rather than doing just government legislation. That's where we might start getting difficulties. We will be under pressure to make more time available in order to allow a wider range of business. We will do that when we know we have the capacity to do it.

So far, I haven't really seen that happening. There are very good relations, as far as I can see, between the Leader of the House, who's in charge of parliamentary business as a minister, and his shadow.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you so much for that.

Mr. McGill, you talked a bit about having a continuity plan. I'm wondering if you can talk a bit about what that is.

One of the discussions we've had in this committee has been about making sure that whatever recommendations we're sending, they really look at how we can adjust to any kind of occurrence that may happen in the future for this. Was there a baseline plan that you were able to implement moving forward or did I mishear you?

[David McGill]

No, I don't think you misheard me. We did have existing business continuity plans, in line with the standard plans that I think a lot of legislatures and other businesses have, and just by outrageous coincidence.... There are different aspects of business continuity plans and different scenarios that might unfold, and the coincidence was that as recently as December we had rehearsed our response to a pandemic. I have to qualify that by saying that in no way did we anticipate just the scale of this pandemic.

The purpose of that exercise was to see how we would descale parliamentary business, how we would identify which of the services that we provide as a parliamentary service were absolutely crucial to the continued ability of Parliament to meet, what the absolute minimum number of staff would be needed to deliver those services and how to support home working.

Those were the things that we had got down to a fair level of detail, which gave us some comfort when we started to respond to the unfolding pandemic, but obviously this has taken us to a scale that we didn't anticipate, so we hadn't gone as far as rehearsing remote plenary sessions and remote voting and things like that.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

That's all the time we have. We're going to start our second round of questioning.

I was wondering if I could get agreement up front to change the four five-minute rounds to four minutes each, and then the two 2.5-minute rounds to two minutes so that we can get everybody in within this panel. Is that okay?

Okay.

Mr. Richards, you have four minutes.

Ms. May

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Chair, I have a question that I would like to ask, but I know you're tight for time, so I'll just wait and see if there's any chance.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

I think the Bloc might be willing to give you some time.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Thank you, Ms. Normandin.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Mr. Richards, please, for four minutes.

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

Madam Chair, I'll start with our friends from the U.K.

I saw a news article yesterday about the House of Lords, with your live streaming and the online broadcast that was happening. I guess it was on Wednesday. The personal cellphone numbers of a number of them were read out on the live stream that was broadcast as they either joined or left the session. It forced the proceedings to be halted, I guess.

My understanding was that the intention was to try to get things up and running again for Thursday. I guess you can tell us whether that actually did in fact happen. I understand as well that next week there's an intention to move over to more of a TV-quality broadcasting through Zoom.

I wonder if you can give us an update on this. Tell us how this occurred, what kinds of problems it caused and whether they have been rectified, and whether broadcasting has now happened again.

[Matthew Hamlyn]

I will do my best, because obviously I work for the House of Commons rather than the House of Lords, so I don't have all the details. Maybe through the clerk I can send something in writing afterwards.

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

Sure.

[Matthew Hamlyn]

My understanding is that this was a problem that arose from a particular feature on Microsoft Teams, which actually, ironically, was a security feature. If you're running an ordinary conference with Microsoft Teams, you can have a feature that announces who is doing the meeting. Normally, it would be their name, but if someone has not registered their name, it will read out the phone number of the person who is joining.

This had been disabled in the configuration that was being used for the broadcast. For reasons to do with where Microsoft puts its systems, I think they had been moved somewhere overnight and that change to the feature had been put back to the factory settings, as it were, which didn't become clear until they were actually in session.

My understanding is that apart from everything else, the chief executive of Microsoft has written to the Lords Speaker to apologize. That there has been a technical data breach of the House of Lords, I think is being referred to the information commissioner. They are switching to using the Zoom platform next week, so that particular issue has gone away, although, as a colleague from Scotland, I think, said earlier, all video conferencing platforms probably have some security aspects to them. The Lords certainly is back on track now, but as of next week, they'll be using exactly the same approach as the Commons.

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

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Mr. McCowan, my understanding from news reports is that Zoom hasn't been approved for any government discussions by the Communications Security Establishment. Yet here we are with the government having pushed forward with a virtual Parliament that uses Zoom.

Those things really do seem a little out of sync, from my perspective. I want to get your perspective on that.

[Ian McCowan]

I should start by telling you that I'm not a security expert and I don't have a good factual basis to respond to your question. However, if it's the will of the committee, I'd certainly be willing to talk to my colleagues in the security area and get you the latest on the government's perspective on that.

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

Sure, but let me just ask you, are you aware of these news reports? Are they accurate? Is that what the Communications Security Establishment...?

I understand you're not an expert, but you obviously would rely on their advice. If the Communications Security Establishment is in fact saying that it's not approved for government discussions, why would we be making decisions—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

That's all the time we have.

Sorry, Mr. McCowan, perhaps you could just briefly answer.