Evidence of meeting #21 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 43rd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was parliaments.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
Quickly, how do proxies work on deferred divisions?
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Very simply, a proxy vote is one where another member is able to cast the vote for that person. A member can fill in a pink slip for the other person, sign it on their behalf and hand it in, because that's been allowed by the Speaker.
One thing that has changed is that deferred divisions have a longer period to vote with.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
You do the proxy vote during a deferred division.
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Yes.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
You get up votes for a week or two weeks and call in the members in a safe way. Within your Standing Orders, you can actually do your duty to vote.
I'd like to pivot a bit. Were there any national parties that had a stance during the last election that they would like to go to electronic voting or a virtual Parliament?
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Yes. The Scottish National Party have the very policy that they would like to move to electronic voting, full stop. They don't want to have the division lobby.
I suspect there's quite a number of members who are keen on the idea of having more electronic voting, because voting does take time. It's 15 minutes for every vote, and we can have four votes in quick succession. We spend an hour of our day when we can't do meetings. We can't be part of committees like this. We are in the division lobby. Also, at the moment, our votes are taking closer to half an hour because of social distancing. That's a significant part of our day that we're losing to being in a division lobby—or queuing to be a division lobby, as things stand.
Conservative
Corey Tochor Conservative Saskatoon—University, SK
I would like to quickly ask how you will come out of some of the changes that you've introduced.
In Canada, as I've stated, we were able to dine at restaurants last night here in Saskatoon. We've heard about how B.C. has done a fabulous job of protecting its citizens. We're getting back to normal. We have mass gatherings across Canada, which is showing that we can safely get back to some kind of normalcy here.
How do you roll back those changes? Is it a straight majority of members who decide to go back to the previous standing orders?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota
You're over time. I was trying to allow you to finish your statement. Maybe that response can be combined with a response to something else later.
Mr. Turnbull, please.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thanks to all of the witnesses for being here today. I find your testimony really informative for us.
I want to start with you, Ms. Bradley. Again, thank you for being here. In the last study of this committee, I clung to to a piece of writing, a letter that you sent to your House Speaker on May 5, 2020. In that letter, you wrote that, “The Committee is satisfied with the assurances it has been given about the security of the system.” I think this was in reference to a virtual parliament. Given Mr. Stutely's testimony today as well, which likened that to our banking system as being fairly rigorous, would you stand by that statement in your letter?
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Yes, absolutely. What was proved was that the system was very robust. It was very secure. We tested it, and we had a number of concerns that we raised. For example, one of the things that we had in the original trial vote was the possibility of changing our vote. We felt that it wasn't an appropriate thing and that it created risks.
Just to answer to the point about how procedures will change, the motions that are in place at the moment to allow for any kind of virtual participation all lapse on July 7. Unless they are extended by the government and the government puts motions down, the House will go back to its old way of doing things.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
You mentioned testing. I understand that you went through some pretty rigorous testing. Those details were in that letter as well. I found that very impressive. Because we're studying how to implement virtual voting, would you recommend to this committee that we do rigorous testing and demonstrations?
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Absolutely, and I think that for any change to any voting system, if it's a lesson that we had from last week, in the headlines that you will have seen, it was that the new form of voting was not tested before a live division. I would recommend that for any changes to any voting systems there are trials and tests, and that members are allowed to feel comfortable and confident with the proposal.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Thank you. I'm going to go to Mr. Stutely now.
Mr. Stutely, you're a software developer. It sounds like you have a lot of experience. Is it not true that in software development it generally follows that you design a minimally viable product, you then beta test and test over and over again, and then redevelop gradually? It's inherently gradual and iterative, is it not, in terms of process?
Director of Software Engineering, Parliamentary Digital Service, Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Yes, definitely—well, by and large, yes, that is how we would build the products.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Okay. Great.
I want to ask a general question about behavioural change. It seems to me that you mentioned familiarity with the current platform numerous times, and in speaking about why you designed your remote voting system on the MemberHub platform, you said a lot of it had to do with familiarity. Ms. Bradley, you just said as well that it's important for people to feel comfortable and accustomed.
In some of the procedural committee remarks, or the remarks that Ms. Bradley made, I noticed that there was reference to a vast number of volunteers having to walk people through how to log in and use the MemberHub platform. Although it's been there for three years, people weren't used to using it, or that's what I read between the lines.
Would you say that's true, Mr. Stutely?
Director of Software Engineering, Parliamentary Digital Service, Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
What we knew from our general statistics was that about two-thirds of members were tabling questions through the MemberHub. The procedure allows members to delegate certain tasks to their staff to do on their behalf, and tabling an oral question is one of them.
What we found once we dug into a bit more detail was that of that two-thirds, it was pretty much fifty-fifty between members who were doing it themselves and members who were letting their staff do it for them. We focused on that group of members who perhaps weren't using it actively themselves a lot of the time, and the one-third who just weren't using it at all, to make sure they were familiar.
The key thing to point out is that front-bench government ministers, and probably front-bench opposition, don't table questions. Ministers certainly can't table oral questions, because they answer them, and the opposition front benches don't tend to table very many questions in that way.
There is quite a good chunk of the House that just doesn't have cause to use it. We had a former prime minister who never used it before.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Yes, I've got it: There are a considerable number of people who don't adopt this technology right away.
What I'm getting at is that it seems that the vast majority of user adoption for these new tools has to do with behavioural change, not whether we can actually do it or not. The technology exists, and we've conquered the security issues.
Would you say that's correct, Ms. Bradley?
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Yes, I think that's fair. I think we found one member who had never even actually used a mobile phone, but they now can vote, so yes.
Liberal
Conservative
John Brassard Conservative Barrie—Innisfil, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
My question is for Ms. Bradley.
With respect to electronic voting, you mentioned one party advocating it in its previous platform. I'm just asking for clarification. Were they advocating for the electronic voting so that the members of Parliament would not sit in the seat of Parliament, or was it to be remote voting without any sittings of Parliament, or was it to be in person?
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
I think there would be various reasons they might cite, but they are the Scottish National Party, which advocates Scottish independence. They have, in the Scottish Parliament, where the Scottish National Party runs the government, a form of electronic voting for which you need to be physically present, but you actually vote by pressing a button rather than by walking through a division lobby.
Conservative
John Brassard Conservative Barrie—Innisfil, ON
Right, so in other words you couldn't be sitting in Glasgow and voting on something, just to be clear. Okay. Thank you.
I have another question for you. Is there a consensus at Westminster that any procedural changes to respond to the pandemic must be limited in scope or duration?
I think you touched earlier on the need to look at changes to the Standing Orders under normal times, and that the height of a pandemic and all that is going on with that is not the time to be dealing with any procedural changes.
I wonder if you can expand on those two points.
Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
I think my committee would not have recommended any changes at all unless we could be confident that they would be strictly time-limited and temporary.
We're very aware that the House of Commons has developed its procedures over 700 years. The biggest changes to our proceedings in 700 years have happened in the last few weeks. They should not automatically become changes to procedure for normal times. It is quite right that we review our procedures, and we do so on a regular basis, and that is one of the things my committee does, but it shouldn't be that changes made as a result of the pandemic become the norm for normal times.
Conservative
John Brassard Conservative Barrie—Innisfil, ON
If any parties had called for permanent electronic or remote voting, for example, how concerned would you or your colleagues have been if that had been the case?