Procedure and House Affairs Committee on June 4th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

I call this meeting to order.

Good morning, everyone. Seeing that almost everyone is here, we'll get started.

Welcome to meeting number 20 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

The committee is meeting on its study of parliamentary duties and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pursuant to the motion adopted by the House on May 26, the committee may continue to sit virtually until Monday, September 21, 2020, to consider matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic and other matters. Certain limitations on the virtual committee meetings held until now are now removed.

As mentioned, the committee is now able to consider other matters, and in addition to receiving evidence, may also consider motions as we normally do. As stipulated in the latest order of reference from the House, all motions shall be decided by a recorded vote.

Finally, the House has also authorized our committee to conduct some of our proceedings in camera, specifically for the purpose of considering draft reports or the selection of witnesses. On this point, the Clerk of the House has informed the whips that until the House administration finalizes a process to seamlessly switch between public and in camera proceedings within the same meeting, all virtual meetings that begin in public must remain in public until the end, and all virtual meetings that begin in camera must remain in camera until the end.

Today’s meeting is taking place by video conference, and the proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. Let us be aware that the webcast will always show the person speaking, rather than the entirety of the committee.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow:

Interpretation in the video conference will work very much like in a regular committee meeting. You have the choice on the bottom of your screen of either “Floor”, “English” or “French”. If you're speaking in one language, I prefer that you switch to the language in which you are speaking. If you are going to switch your languages, then please pause for a moment and switch to the language that you intend on speaking at the bottom of your screen where it says “Interpretation”. Allow for a brief pause while you're doing so.

I remind everyone that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

Should members need to request the floor outside their designated time for questions, they should activate their mike and state that they have a point of order.

If a member wishes to intervene on a point of order that has been raised by another member, the member should use the “Raise hand” function. This will signal to me that you're interested in speaking. To do so, please click on the “Participant” icon in the toolbar below. In that you will see a raise-hand function.

When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute. The use of headsets is strongly encouraged.

Should any technical challenges arise—for example, in relation to interpretation or a problem with your audio—please advise the chair immediately, and the technical team will work to resolve them. Please note that we may need to suspend during these times, as we need to ensure that all members are able to participate fully.

If your screen or your computer disconnects, please email me or the clerk to let us know this has taken place, and we'll immediately call you and try to resolve the issue. If it's just a matter of interpretation or sound, then you can signal in some other way in this meeting, and we'll try to suspend while we resolve the issue.

During this meeting, we will follow the same rules that usually apply to opening statements and the questioning of witnesses during our regular meetings. Just as we usually would in a regular committee meeting, we will suspend in between panels to allow the first group of witnesses to depart and the next panel to join the meeting.

Before we get started, can everyone please click on the top right corner and ensure you are on “Gallery” view so that you have a view of all the members of the committee? If you haven't been using the “Zoom” function for the witnesses when someone is speaking, as you can see around my box, there is a highlighted yellow box, so you'll know which member is speaking and how to find them in the gallery view.

The witnesses today have seven minutes for their opening statements. I believe you've all been made aware of that.

Without further ado, I would like to welcome our witnesses today.

On our first panel, we have the former Clerk of the House, Mr. Bosc. Welcome back to our committee. Thank you for being here again today.

[Marc Bosc, Former Acting Clerk of the House of Commons, As an Individual]

I'm glad to be here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you.

We have Mr. Dale Smith, a journalist whom I think a lot of us recognize. Thank you for being here today.

[Dale Smith, Freelance Journalist and Author, As an Individual]

Thank you for inviting me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

We also have the Honourable Bill Blaikie with us.

Thank you for being with us here today.

[Bill Blaikie, Former Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, As an Individual]

Good morning.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Good morning.

Finally, last but not least, we have with us Mr. Kevin Deveaux, lawyer and chief executive officer of Deveaux International Governance Consultants. Thank you for being with here with us today.

We will begin with the Honourable Bill Blaikie. Could you begin your seven-minute opening statement, please?

[Bill Blaikie]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Bosc, go ahead, please.

[Marc Bosc]

Madam Chair, I did not prepare a statement for today. I'm here to answer questions and contribute in other ways, but I have no opening statement today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Fantastic. Thank you very much. I'm sure there are going to be lots of questions.

Mr. Smith, please go ahead.

[Dale Smith]

Hi. For those of you who are unaware, I've been a journalist on Parliament Hill for almost 12 years now. I also am the author of a book called The Unbroken Machine: Canada's Democracy in Action, which is a primer on civic literacy and responsible government and Westminster parliaments in Canada.

I'm guessing I've been invited here today because I've written a number of columns in recent weeks that have been in opposition to a virtual Parliament in various ways. I'll start with outlining what some of my concerns are.

My biggest concern, obviously, is that Parliament is something that works best in person. A lot of the most important work that happens in Parliament is relationship building, and that happens on the sidelines, in rooms, in lobbies and in corridors, and it's something that can't happen at all in a virtual space. That's one of the concerns that I definitely have about a longer-term hybrid environment.

As well, I'm particularly concerned because there's a long history of unintended consequences with rule changes that happen in Parliament. Some of the examples that come to mind are when we capped speaking times at 20 minutes. Instead of creating a livelier culture of debate, all it did was create a culture of MPs reading canned speeches to fill time, as opposed to actually having back-and-forth exchanges in the chamber. That's incredibly concerning to me.

Another unintended consequence was the elimination of evening sittings in the early 1990s. That meant MPs were no longer having dinner with one another in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week, and as a result, the collegiality in the chamber crumbled. It's no longer the same kind of environment that it was back then.

A further example I would cite would be the decision to expel Liberal senators from caucus. The unintended consequence was basically to eliminate the institutional memory of the caucus, as well as centralize more power with the leader.

As any kind of rule changes have unintended consequences, I think we need to think very hard about what those consequences might be in this particular circumstance.

When it comes to hybrid sittings and remote voting, one of my biggest concerns among these unintended consequences is that as much as people keep saying these need to be temporary, it nevertheless was mentioned in the previous report of this committee that there should be an exploration of using these means to modernize the rules of the House of Commons. For me, that means this is essentially a Pandora's box now—that any changes we adopt, even if they are thought to be temporary, will see people who are looking for them to be made permanent. [Technical difficulty—Editor] concerns about what these rule changes might lead to.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you. That was interesting.

Mr. Deveaux, please go ahead.

[Kevin Deveaux, Lawyer and Chief Executive Officer, Deveaux International Governance Consultants Inc.]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to present to the committee today.

For those who don't know me, and I think most of you don't, I will start with why you may be interested in what I have to say.

I have been a lawyer for the last 30 years, based here in Nova Scotia. I was an MLA for nine years in the House of Assembly here. I was the official opposition House leader during two minority Parliaments in 2004 and 2007.

After leaving politics, I worked for the United Nations Development Programme for six years, including four as the global adviser on parliaments. For the last eight years, I've been a consultant, based in Halifax and working with different international organizations trying to build effective parliaments around the world. I've worked directly with more than 60 parliaments globally, and I've worked with MPs from more than 110 countries. I'm also an instructor at McGill University in parliamentary development.

Briefly, that will let you know my background.

There are four main points I wanted to bring up, but I think Mr. Smith and Mr. Blaikie have touched on my first one. I won't expand too much more on that. I'll just say that I agree that the personal relationships—the dialogue—are the grease that oils the machine in politics in Canada. The more we break down that relationship—I think Mr. Smith gave some examples of how that has happened, and Mr. Blaikie, in his article, has done the same—the more acrimonious you're going to find Parliament. We have only to look south of the border to see some of the challenges that it will eventually lead to. I'll leave it there, but that's just to say that I agree with them on that point.

The other one, I think, is that we are obviously in the middle of a pandemic, and we have these dialogues now. We have House leaders who talk to each other. We have party apparatus that work together as a dialogue in Parliament, but during a pandemic, I think it's even more important that we formalize that structure.

I want to bring to you the example of New Zealand, which has a Business Committee that is a formal standing committee in Parliament. In their case, it is a full-time committee. I would suggest that maybe we try it in the pandemic, because I think there might be some value in formalizing the dialogue.

The Business Committee is chaired by the Speaker. It has on it the House leaders from every recognized party. As a result, what they end up with is a consensus on the agenda, on the Order Paper or on how long debate will be on a certain bill or motion or on supply. They're able to work this out in a formal setting, but it allows for consensus.

During a pandemic, when we all should be concerned about national consensus on the way forward—and I think political partisan approaches have tended to be checked so far—I think this needs to be considered. During national emergencies like this one, the opportunity for a formal approach, where there is that dialogue in Parliament to make sure that you can work out as many issues as possible, needs to be considered.

I guess my third and fourth points are related. The third point is related to virtual voting.

I want to echo Mr. Smith's comments with regard to unintended consequences when you change the rules. I worry as well that if you allow virtual voting, there will be, as he noted, a tendency for some MPs to stay in their constituencies more often. That will directly impact that cross-party dialogue between MPs and between parties, but I think it can also be seen as a bit of a trap, if I can put it that way.

There are MPs who are perhaps more remotely located or have work-life balance issues and who may choose to do that, and if we do that, if it becomes permanent, I think we're going to end up with a two-tiered system of MPs. There will be those who come to Ottawa and engage directly with senior officials and ministers and have more influence on policy-making, and there will be those who will be more constituency-oriented and spend less time in Ottawa, and they're going to be seen differently in their ability to influence.

I think that there are unintended consequences from virtual voting. I'd like to suggest an alternative, and Mr. Blaikie brought this up briefly. It is the possibility of party block voting. Again, New Zealand and also Victoria State and Queensland State in Australia use this approach, but let me be clear to start: We already have a pretty efficient system of voting in the Canadian parliamentary system. It's voice vote.

I took a rough look at the numbers on the House of Commons records. Since 2005, 92.6% of all the votes in Parliament in the House of Commons have been voice votes. It's a very efficient way of moving things along without having to get into recorded voting. It's a very efficient way of moving things along without having to get into recorded voting. We use recorded votes sparingly. We use them during contentious moments or during very important recording moments, so I think we need to keep that voice vote as an approach.

Then you can look at using block voting instead of virtual voting when we do have recorded votes. This would mean—and this is how they do it in New Zealand and parts of Australia—that the House leader or a member from the party would stand up and say, “This many votes from my caucus will be voting yea, and this many nay.” It allows for dissension. If certain MPs want to say, “No, we don't want to be part of that block vote”, they have a way of recording their personal votes. Again, as proxy voting, it allows for the moving along of recorded votes without having to move to virtual voting. It's a procedural change, not a technical change. I think, given the efficiencies that we now have in the system with voice voting, I would worry about moving away from that. I've also seen electronic voting become very complicated in other countries. I'm happy to discuss that, if people want, as well.

In conclusion, thank you again for this opportunity. Thank you for the work of the committee, all the standing committees and the House of Commons. You've done a miraculous job of being able to technically bring this all together in a very short period of time. I monitor a lot of parliaments around the world, and Canada is now a symbol of one that can be seen as a leader in this regard.

Looking at technological and other rule changes is a good thing. It's always good to be looking, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are a lot of good things that are working right now in Parliament. We need to make sure that those are not abandoned or lost as we move forward.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you so much.

You're absolutely right. The House of Commons team have done a fantastic job, in a very short period of time, of being able to manage all the changes that have been thrown at them. It's been incredible to see.

I have a couple of things before we move on to the question rounds.

First, with regard to the phone lines that some of the members' staff listen to, there is a bit of difficulty connecting those phone lines to the Zoom meeting today so that they can continue. Otherwise, they can turn on ParlVU and try to follow along through ParlVU until we get that fixed and up and running. I'll let you know if the phone lines become available. Until then, they should try to watch ParlVU and follow along that way.

Next we have Mr. Blaikie and Mr. Smith.

The translators are saying that your sound is not as clear as they would like it to be, so perhaps, Mr. Blaikie, if you could move closer to your device, that may solve the problem.

[Bill Blaikie]

Is that better now?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

It sounds better to me, but let's see....

Mr. Smith, you may need to hold your mike a bit closer to your mouth, but not too close either, so that we don't have that sound that is a little hard to listen to.

[Dale Smith]

All right. I will try to remember to do that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Try to be mindful of holding the mike a bit closer.

We will carry on with the rounds for questions. We're beginning with Mr. Richards for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll start with Mr. Blaikie.

When you were a member of this committee, I think back in 2001, there was another freshly re-elected Liberal government that was pushing toward electronic voting. You, at the time, described that exercise as—and I'll quote you—“kind of a bean-counting exercise”. What you were referring to was that the committee was being asked to rubber-stamp something, I guess, that the government was trying to push forward.

Are you concerned that rushing forward very quickly, as is being proposed we do right now with this study, might be akin to what you were experiencing back then—that this would be kind of another bean-counting exercise, so to speak, and something that we should move forward with a little more cautiously?

[Bill Blaikie]

Well, I have been concerned for a long time about the unintended consequences of electronic voting. I say this as someone who was part of the McGrath committee back in 1985-1986, which initially recommended electronic voting. The reason the committee did that at the time was that we were hoping for a Parliament in which there would be less party discipline on a number of issues, and we thought that electronic voting might facilitate that, in the sense that it would get rid of the situation of members who wanted to dissent from the position of their party having to stand up and listen to the applause from other parties or look at the frowns on the faces of their colleagues.

That was the intention, but over the years, as it wasn't immediately implemented, obviously, I came to the view that one of the unintended consequences—and certainly other witnesses this morning have spoken about it—would be that we would lose that time in the parliamentary life when the bells are ringing, people are on the floor and a lot of business is done.

When the bells are ringing and people are gathering, it's a time for members to go over and talk to people on the other side or to talk to cabinet ministers to whom they might have no other access. I felt that the price for adopting electronic voting was just too high, and so I changed my mind on it. As the House leader for the NDP, I was often able to stand in the way of its becoming a reality. I continue to hold that position.

What I had to say today was that if people have the agenda that they want electronic voting in Parliament, they should not use the pandemic as a way of importing an agenda they would have in a normal Parliament into this particular temporary measure. That was the point I was trying to make today. I'm not accusing anybody of that; I'm just saying that it is a danger and perhaps a temptation on some people's part. Let's look at what we need for the pandemic, and when we get back to a normal Parliament, we can continue to have these other discussions.

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

Sure. That's wise advice, I think.

When we talk about the idea of wise advice, Mr. Bosc, you were here in our previous study a few weeks ago, or roughly thereabouts, and your wise advice at the time was that the committee should take a more cautious, more deliberative approach to what we were looking at. Obviously, the committee decided to move forward pretty quickly. I wonder if you still hold the belief that it would be better to be cautious and deliberative about this or if you think that maybe the committee ended up taking the right approach.

As a subquestion, this study has a deadline of June 23 to look at pushing forward with further change. Do you think that's a sensible, reasonable deadline, or do you think that we're again rushing too quickly into something?

[Marc Bosc]

I have two points.

First, I would say that I agree with Mr. Blaikie that the changes made so far relate to a pandemic situation. I think that has to be the lens through which you look at this particular exercise. The speed with which the hybrid model for the committee has been adopted, to me, is not a particular concern, but as Mr. Blaikie pointed out, if the tendency or the temptation is to make these changes permanent, that's a whole other issue.

In terms of voting, to me the missing piece in all of this right now that's preventing a full return of the House—a hybrid House, I mean—is voting and figuring out how to vote. If I had one wish, it would be that the committee find a way, find a consensus, on how voting could take place so that the House could properly resume.

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

Okay. Thank you.

Very quickly, for any of you who would like to answer, you've all kind of indicated that this is something we should be looking at only for extraordinary situations and emergency situations like the one we're facing, and that we should not allow this to become something permanent. That seems to be what I'm hearing from all of you.

Can any of you give us any advice on how we might go about safeguarding that to make sure these measures are used only for those kinds of situations and don't creep in as a permanent measure, with all the unintended consequences that you've all warned us about? Does anyone want to take a stab at that?

Mr. Deveaux, I see your hand.

[Kevin Deveaux]

Thank you.

I think this was discussed in the last report of the committee. If you had stand-alone standing orders or special standing orders that could be triggered somehow by a declaration of a national emergency, which I know in this case wasn't done, or through some other trigger that would allow us to pull out standing orders that would be used during that situation, whether for a fixed time or for a particular event, I think that might be a good approach.