Thank you, Chair.
Good morning to you, to all my fellow witnesses and to the members of the committee.
I'd like to begin my presentation with thanks for the opportunity to contribute to this important discussion. As some of you may know, I have a long-standing interest in, and concern for, the well-being of Parliament as a place where the highest expectations of Canadians for their democracy are lived up to. Fortunately for me, I had a great deal of opportunity to engage with this challenge of creating such a Parliament over my 32 years as a parliamentarian, from 1979 to 2008 as a member of Parliament and for two and a half years as an MLA in Manitoba.
By way of background, I was privileged to serve on the Special Committee on Standing Orders and Procedure, which was created as a response to the 16-day bell-ringing crisis in 1982; on the special committee on parliamentary reform that existed from 1984 to 1986, which produced what is sometimes known as the McGrath report; and on several subsequent less high-profile collaborations concerning the reform of the rules and the culture of the House of Commons.
I also had the benefit of a number of positions over the years that put me in close proximity to the way in which the rules of the House work—and sometimes don't work as well as we would like them to—serving as House leader for the NDP, as parliamentary leader, as Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons and as government House leader in the Manitoba legislature.
With a great deal of interest, then, I accepted the challenge to be part of the process whereby the committee is charged with making recommendations on how to modify the Standing Orders for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of an incremental approach, beginning with the hybrid sittings of the House, as outlined in the report provided to the committee by the Speaker on May 11, 2020.
When I read the report submitted by the Speaker, I was pleased to see repeated emphasis on the temporary nature of what was being proposed, as that is certainly one of the points I would want to make today. Whatever decisions are taken as a result of the pandemic, such as the decision to have the hybrid Parliament agreed upon already, and any decisions that flow from it by way of implementation or improvement on what was agreed upon, should be clearly seen as not in any way setting precedents for the post-pandemic Parliament that I am sure we all hope is in the near as opposed to distant future.
In this respect, I would urge members not to import into the debate about the hybrid Parliament preferences or proposals that they may have long supported as changes to normal parliamentary reality. I am particularly concerned about any way in which remote voting might pave the way for electronic voting in a post-pandemic Parliament, something that I recently wrote about in an article for rabble.ca. In the same article, I expressed a larger concern about the erosion of personal contact and personal interaction between MPs, within and between parties, that is a feature of various modern technologies available not just to MPs but to all Canadians.
Nevertheless, if remote or virtual voting is to take place in the hybrid Parliament, I would certainly recommend that such voting take place in ways and at times that are known in advance and are predictable. Consideration could also be given, should voting occur, to the option of party whips indicating how their members are voting on any particular division, with provision made, of course, for those who may dissent from the group decision to cast their own vote. This would not be unlike the practice that developed in my time in the House, when the whips got up and indicated how their members were voting.
In conclusion, I would emphasize that the agreement to create a hybrid Parliament was the result of a negotiation reached in the context of a looming deadline. It should be seen as something open to improvement. The return of opposition days, perhaps, or take-note debates that wouldn't require votes, or perhaps some other complementary hybrid within the hybrid that would give opposition parties more opportunity to occasionally choose the subject of debate, should be looked at as the hybrid goes forward; likewise with private members' business, and perhaps even the estimates.
My hope is certainly that all these concerns will be met, preferably by a timely return to normal parliamentary life when the pandemic ends. If that should take longer than we all hope, then hopefully the recommendations of the committee will stand Parliament in good stead.
Thank you.