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.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Hon. Karen Bradley  Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Simon Burton  Clerk Assistant, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Matt Stutely  Director of Software Engineering, Parliamentary Digital Service, Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Greg Power  Founder and Board Chair, Global Partners Governance
Gabriela Cuevas Barron  President, Inter-Parliamentary Union
Sue Griffiths  Executive Director, Global Partners Governance
Clerk of the Committee  Mr. Justin Vaive

11:05 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

I call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number 21 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

The committee is meeting on the 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, to consider matters related to COVID-19 and other matters. Certain limitations on virtual committee meetings held until now are now removed. As just mentioned, the committee is now able to consider other matters, and in addition to receiving evidence, the committee 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 way of 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 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. We are in public. So that you are aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entirety of the committee as you see it in gallery view on your screen.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow. Interpretation in this video conference will work very much like in a regular committee meeting. You have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of floor, English or French.

As you are speaking, if you plan to alternate from one language to the other, you will need to also switch the interpretation channel so that it aligns with the language you are speaking. You may want to allow for a short pause when switching languages.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. When you are ready to speak, you can click on the microphone icon to activate your mike.

As a reminder, all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

Should members need to request the floor outside of their designated time for questions, they should activate their mike and state that they have a point of order. If the member wishes to intervene on a point of order that has been raised by another member, they should use the “Raise Hand” function in the “Participants” toolbar. This will signal to the chair your interest to speak. In order to do so, you should click on “Participants” at the bottom of the screen. When the list pops up, next to your name there's a “Raise Hand” function.

When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute. Headsets are strongly encouraged.

Should any technical challenges arise, as I mentioned before, please bring them up with the chair immediately and the technical team can help you resolve those issues so that all members can participate fully.

During this meeting we will follow the same rules that usually apply to opening statements and the questioning of witnesses. The witnesses will have seven minutes for their opening statements.

Just as we usually would in a regular committee meeting, we will suspend in between panels in order to allow the first group of witnesses to depart and for the next panel to join the meeting.

Before we get started, I would ask everyone to click on the top right-hand corner of their screen and ensure they are in gallery view. With this view you should be able to view all the participants in a grid format so all the participants can see one another.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses.

We have from the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Right Honourable Karen Bradley, who is also the chair of the procedure committee. We're glad you were able to join us, Ms. Bradley. We were getting a little worried and wondering whether we'd be able to have you here today. I'm glad you were able to make it.

Next we have Mr. Simon Burton from the House of Lords of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He is the assistant clerk.

From the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, we have Matt Stutely, director of software engineering, parliamentary digital service.

Welcome to all of you. We will start with the Right Honourable Karen Bradley for a seven-minute statement, please.

June 9th, 2020 / 11:10 a.m.

Karen Bradley Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Thank you very much. I've managed to unmute myself, I hope.

11:10 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

Yes, you absolutely have.

11:10 a.m.

Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Karen Bradley

Good. The technology works all the way from London.

You will have my opening statement, so I wasn't proposing to read it out to you, but just to pick out the key points.

First of all, thank you very much, Madam Chair and all members of the committee, for the invitation. It has been very useful for us in the U.K. to look at what other parliaments are doing, and I'm sure you will also find it useful to hear about our experiences.

In terms of our committee, the procedure committee of the House of Commons is not exactly aligned to the committee that you have in Canada. Our committee is dealing with the procedures that affect public business, so we—

11:10 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

Madam Bradley, I'm so very sorry to interrupt you, but I think this might be relevant to your statement. I wanted to let you to know that the statements you've provided have not been distributed to the members, just so you know that they don't have them and may not know about some of the things you're referencing.

11:10 a.m.

Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

11:10 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

We were not able to distribute them because they were not translated, and we were not able to translate them because they were not received in enough time. We're not allowed to distribute documents to the members unless they're in both English and French—

11:10 a.m.

Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Karen Bradley

No, of course.

11:10 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

—so please be mindful that this is the first time we're hearing your statement. Thank you.

11:10 a.m.

Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Karen Bradley

In that case, I will read it out. It's probably easier if I read it rather than try to summarize it.

First, let me give you a word about the committee I chair. I was elected to chair the committee in a contested election, which involves all members of the House of Commons. It's not a party political thing. This is a House committee, and the chair is elected by all members. The election in this Parliament happened in January this year. Although the election was then, we weren't able to formally constitute the committee until Monday, March 2. I then took up my position and all members of the committee were appointed. Our first meeting was on March 4 this year. It was clear to us at that point that the COVID situation would require some substantial amendments to House practice.

The procedure committee is a committee of backbench MPs. We do not have members of the executive as part of our committee. We have no executive role. Our remit is “to consider the practice and procedure of the House in the conduct of public business, and to make recommendations”. We do not have a remit to consider House administration alongside House procedure, as your committee does. My colleague Sir Charles Walker, with whom I think you've also been in contact, chairs a separate committee, the administration committee, which oversees the services provided to members. Then we have the House of Commons Commission, which is a statutory body chaired by the Speaker. That sets the strategic direction for the House service. It is often the forum in which high-level political agreement on certain issues will be found.

My committee can consider issues proposed by committee members, other members of the House, members of the public, the Speaker and even ministers. We are not constrained in the recommendations we make, except in the means of their implementation. That's where changes to House procedure and practice are typically made by the House itself, but the motions on which the House decides are brought forward by the government, by the leader of the House of Commons. He is the minister with responsibilities in the House of Commons, most similar, I think, to those of the leader of the government in yours. The reality is that if we make recommendations about changes to House procedure, they have to be supported by the government before they can be implemented.

In terms of the pandemic, there have been a number of changes, very significant changes, to the way in which House business has been conducted over the last few months. The changes have fallen into three phases.

The first phase involved ad hoc adaptations. Before we rose for the Easter recess, the period from the beginning of March to around March 23 or 24, we made ad hoc adaptations. We didn't make large-scale procedural changes. Instead, we reached agreement between the parties. For example, we didn't have any physical divisions at the House of Commons in that period to avoid the fact that, due to the way in which divisions took place, members would have to be very close together, and we managed to do significant items of business. For example, our budget resolutions were passed on the nod, effectively, with no division happening. We also moved into having social distancing within the chamber. Although we didn't have any formal blocking out of seats, we had to limit the number of members to 50 for showpiece events like Prime Minister's questions, which I'm sure you're all aware of.

After we came back from the Easter recess, we moved into what we called fully hybrid proceedings with parity, which meant that we allowed virtual participation. We developed a system of remote voting. We have no differentiation between members who were there physically in person and members who attended virtually. I can go into more details about hybrid proceedings later; I'm conscious of the time.

Since our return from the Whitsun recess, which was only last week, we moved to a different form of proceedings, which we're calling limited virtual participation, for a much more active chamber. Although there are still only 50 people allowed in the chamber, we do allow virtual participation for questions—questions during statements and urgent questions—but not for substantive legislative business, such as second reading debates and other debates.

We also have just announced that we will extend the proxy voting system that we've only previously used for paternity leave to those members who are unable to attend the House due to shielding on the government advice, or because they cannot attend the House due to the restrictions that the coronavirus has imposed.

The new provisions we have in place will last until July 7.

Hopefully that gives you a brief update on where we are.

11:15 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

Absolutely. Thank you very much for that.

Next up we have Clerk Assistant Simon Burton, please.

11:15 a.m.

Simon Burton Clerk Assistant, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Thank you very much indeed, Madam Chair, and to the committee for this invitation. I am delighted to be here representing the House of Lords, on behalf of our Clerk, and for the invitation from your Clerk, Charles Robert, who is a great friend and a colleague we all admire across the world, particularly in his relationships with other senior colleagues.

I'll start with a couple of small facts about the House of Lords because they are relevant to how we have responded to this pandemic.

The House is large. We have 789 members. There is also no government majority; only 244 of those 789 are on the government benches.

The House is self-regulating. The power of the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker is traditionally very limited, and indeed there are limited tools the government controls, like programming motions, etc. As Ms. Bradley said, it's important that the decision-making processes behind the scenes are linked into that concept of self-regulation. In the Lords our procedure committee and our commission—the procedure committee oversees procedure; the commission oversees the administration at a strategic level—both include the leaders of all the main parties in the Lords, as well as the Speaker, the Lord Speaker and the Deputy Speaker, so there are two decision-making bodies that bring people together.

Another factor that is very relevant in the current circumstances is the demographic profile of the House of Lords, with 54% of our members over 70 years of age, which in the U.K. is a threshold for particular attention to people's health and their vulnerability.

Also importantly, unlike some other bicameral parliaments, we're very fortunate to share our building with our friends and colleagues in the Commons. Not only the building, but many services are also jointly shared and run and administered, including the digital service, which our colleague Matt works with colleagues there. These shared bicameral services are an important feature of what we've managed to achieve in the last few weeks.

You are interested in the modifications the Lords have made to accommodate public health measures. As soon as the Prime Minister's announcement was made in March, in the Commons as Ms. Bradley has said, some physical measures were introduced immediately with some social distancing, and we've built on that in the last weeks and months. Now the whole Palace of Westminster, the chamber of the Lords, all the rooms around the Lords, all the corridors, the lifts, the staircases, everything is now controlled in a way to maximize social distancing and to minimize exposure.

Also, from the beginning the House has encouraged its members to participate remotely. As in the Commons, members come from across the U.K., as is the case in Canada. Remote participation has been important, particularly for the elderly members for whom transport isn't necessarily particularly straightforward.

Both Houses also restricted access for visitors very early on.

In the Lords the decision to move to virtual proceedings was taken in March, but we had our Easter recess and we returned on April 21. We spent two weeks with the House sitting in a purely virtual form using Microsoft Teams and then we moved to Zoom, the platform that we're using today, and the House met in Zoom. It was only yesterday the House moved to the hybrid format with some members present in the chamber, but the overwhelming majority continue to participate via Zoom.

Every Parliament is different. The infrastructure and the technology we use is different, but in our case Zoom is the platform that works best for public broadcasting, and the Lords is very keen that their contributions continue to be accountable and open to the public.

In terms of procedural changes, first the House passed a resolution to allow our procedure committee to issue guidance, which has the same force as guidance approved by the procedure committee through a resolution of the House. This is an important development because in the fast-moving circumstances of a pandemic, having the ability to adapt procedures and guidance in this way has been very helpful.

Second, the House has agreed to a much more structured management of debates with more time limits on debates and on individual speeches.

Third, the House asserted very early on that parliamentary privilege applies to remote proceedings as it does to proceedings in the chamber, although we have advised members that if they are participating remotely in a different jurisdiction, obviously the jurisdiction of that country or that state or that nation may have a view of that, but certainly privilege applies to remote proceedings as they do to physical.

Virtual proceedings do not have the power to decide matters. Only a sitting of the House can decide things. When we were meeting in our virtual format, we did also have small, short physical sittings, but decisions were taken so far without a vote. The hybrid sitting, as we had as of yesterday, not only can debate, but also it can decide things.

There are a few other features of the hybrid House. The chair has absolute power to adjourn the House if it becomes overcrowded. There is no sign of this so far, but the size of our chamber means that to respect social distancing—people staying two metres apart—we cannot accommodate more than 30 members in our chamber. Were that number to be exceeded and were members not able to leave, the chair does have the power to suspend the sitting until it is sorted out.

We also have electronic voting which we are introducing. Matt is leading us on that. Thank you very much, Matt, for your work on that. That is coming in on Monday of next week.

I have a couple of quick insights to round off.

First, after observing the last few weeks, I would say that communication has been key. Our Lord Speaker, our Senior Deputy Speaker and the Clerk of the Parliaments have communicated with members and staff to make sure that everyone knows what's going on.

Second, we've used Teams. While Zoom has been the platform of choice in the hybrid House, we continue to use Teams for conversations and chats between officials and members, and that has been absolutely vital.

I would observe that this isn't quite within the customs of the House, but proceedings have had to become much more structured and managed than they are traditionally in order to cope with a hybrid setting.

The House has also agreed that there should be parity of treatment. Members should be treated the same, whether participating virtually or in person, in the hybrid sitting. That's very important.

There are a couple of practical points to end on. First, cybersecurity has been very much in our minds as we've developed our systems, and many different staff across many teams have worked together and, indeed, have done much new work in order to deliver.

As we look ahead to the future, much of what we've learned in the last few weeks will help us on the journey to restoring and renewing the Palace of Westminster in due course, but that is perhaps for another day.

Thank you.

11:20 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

Thank you very much.

Next up we have Matt Stutely, director of software engineering, Parliamentary Digital Service.

11:20 a.m.

Matt Stutely Director of Software Engineering, Parliamentary Digital Service, Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for inviting me to attend. This is the first-ever committee I have attended formally, certainly outside of the U.K. I spoke with our procedure committee, which wasn't as formal as this, so I hope you will all be gentle with me.

I just want to apologize in advance to the interpreters, because I wasn't able to give speaking notes like my two colleagues. I've only been able to send you a few bullet points, so I will try to talk as slowly as I can to make your lives as easy as possible.

11:25 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

Regarding the interpreters, remember that we have simultaneous interpretation happening.

11:25 a.m.

Director of Software Engineering, Parliamentary Digital Service, Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Matt Stutely

Exactly. I do apologize to them for that.

Thank you very much for indulging me and not making me send you notes.

I'm going to talk about five specific points around the remote voting solution we built for the Commons and are now putting in place for the Lords. At the end, I guess you can ask me questions, as you wish.

The first area is the rationale for the approach we took. Obviously, there are a lot of solutions out there in the marketplace that deliver voting for various different mechanisms. However, we decided to build it in-house as a bespoke development for two reasons. One was around building on software that we already had. Our voting solution in both Houses is already electronic, to the point where it's recorded on tablet devices and collated at the end of the division. The results are published to our website and in Hansard and other such places. We wanted to make sure we built on top of what we already had.

We also wanted to make sure that what we were delivering was familiar to House staff. Obviously, they have a lot of change, a huge amount of change, going on. It's a completely new world for them. Trying to keep some familiarity for them was important.

Equally as important was some familiarity for members. On the Commons site, we have a system for members, called “MemberHub”, which members have had for about three years now. It is used for tabling oral and written questions and for signing motions. Again, it was logical to us that at a time of immense change, when members were working in a completely different way and were obviously under a lot of pressure, we would keep something familiar for them as well.

That's why we didn't go off and try to buy a completely different product off the shelf and customize it. We wanted to build on top of what we had now so that we knew it would work. The integrations would work and take minimal effort for those who have to look after them. As well, members wouldn't be asked to learn another set of log-ins, or have to log in to a different system that worked or behaved in a slightly different way from other things that they were used to. That was the reason we went down that path.

Next, for those who are interested, everything is built on a Microsoft technology stack. It's Microsoft .NET with SQL server databases behind it. Everything communicates over straightforward Internet protocols, but everything is secure. It's all https—the thing with a little padlock, for those of you who are familiar with using a web browser—but everything is secure and sent over the Internet and then web traffic so we can control the pipeline we're operating the system over.

We built the system, which took us about four weeks from beginning to end. We were asked by the Clerk of the House to put together a solution on April 6, and I think the first vote was pretty much five weeks after that. We rolled it out for live testing pretty much four weeks to the day from the day we were asked to start building it. We were asked to start building it before it had been formally agreed, obviously, by the procedure committee, because we wouldn't have wanted to wait until the House was ready. They'd have asked us for a solution, to which we'd have said we needed another four weeks to build it. We wanted the House to be able to use it once they decided they wanted it.

We went through the build process. Whilst we were building it, we were running it and testing it internally first, with our own staff pretending to be members. Then we did a number of demonstrations to various members across various committees. Ms. Bradley and her committee had a demonstration. Some members of the administration committee had a demonstration, as did the leader of the House and the chief whip. So a number of the sort of.... I'll say the wrong thing now and say the “key stakeholders”, but the sort of key stakeholders have been making recommendations about how this should go forward. We're all taking them through the system so that they understand it.

As part of that, we took on board quite a lot of feedback as well. There were ideas which at the beginning sounded very sensible, but it was logical to ask the technical people who were building it about, for example, the ability to let members change their vote during the division. Within a 15-minute window for a division that took place, if a member made a mistake, they could go back and correct it. Having run through this process and received feedback from those who administer this and would have to work with it, we were asked to take that away and instead move to a process of double confirmation, i.e., “Please cast your vote. Are you sure this is the vote you wish to cast?” After that, the vote is locked in. Obviously, that's in line with how it works in the real world. There were lots of little pieces of feedback like that.

The main information that came back—I'm sure you want to ask about this yourselves—was around security. I didn't talk about it too much at the beginning. We have a single sign-on process for members to log in to their parliamentary accounts, to log in to their emails and to log in to their laptops, always with the same password. We built a system with that in mind, so we have the same password, and we have a multifactorial authentication process to double-check that they are who they say they are.

From the point of view of security, it's pretty much the same as you would use for online banking. It's the same concept as that. You have to have your password and a device with a number that you type into the system to confirm it's you.

Once we'd finished the testing, we had to roll the system out. We had two systems in place already, as I say, one for recording the votes and one for the members to interact with. That was rolled out onto those two platforms, and then we ran a second test. This time members took part in pretend divisions on key and interesting questions like, “Does one put tea in the cup before the milk?” and such vital questions of the day, just to engage people. We kept it very non-political because we didn't want to bring anything political around the voting system. That's a completely separate thing, so we wanted to keep it very stand-alone.

Those tests highlighted some issues, as I'm sure we'd expect them to. There were two issues we came up with. The first one was around the performance of the system. A lot of the feedback we had then was, “Well, I can't believe that with 650 MPs you could have a performance problem in your system.”

Because of the way the House works, however, and the many rules and processes around divisions, what's actually going on behind the scenes are a lot of checks to make sure the division is active, that it hasn't been stopped and that the member hasn't voted on another device. There are lots of things going on behind the scenes to ensure the security of the vote taking place. A lot is going on actually when 600 people are logging in. The first time we tried it, the system slowed down quite a lot, so we did a lot of work to improve that.

The second issue we had was around security. We had over-secured our network, and members who were using their parliamentary devices supplied by the digital service were able to vote in our test divisions without any problems, but those who were using their personal devices were being blocked. Basically, our network was responding with, “We don't recognize this device. Go away.”

Again, the reason for doing all that testing up front was to learn all of that and correct all of that before the first live division happened. Once that was all done, we rolled out live divisions, and then the House voted, I think, 10 or 11 times in the first couple of weeks of using it.

11:30 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

Thank you, Mr. Stutely. That was extremely interesting, and I'm sure the members are going to have lots of questions for you.

We're going to have our first round of six-minute questions, and I will start with Mr. Duncan, please.

11:30 a.m.

Conservative

Eric Duncan Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and good afternoon to our witnesses. Thank you for joining us.

Ms. Bradley, I appreciate your being here. In your role as the chair of a committee, I think you bring a unique perspective. You started in opposition and were in a coalition government, a minority government and a majority government, so I think you've seen it all in your role there. I want to focus my first few questions on the report that you did in early May. We actually studied that and used that as part of our first study, going through the same challenges as you were in the United Kingdom.

The electronic system that was adopted was obviously meant to be temporary and was meant to be used for the most acute part of the pandemic, when there were the most challenges and the most lockdowns, and then there was meant to be an easing in to the process of more in-person voting. Would that be a fair statement, looking back on what you've done in the U.K.?

11:30 a.m.

Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Karen Bradley

Yes, I think that would be a fair way to put it.

We always said that we shouldn't introduce any procedural change during the pandemic. Yes, it will help build an evidence base for future changes we might want to make to procedure, but we shouldn't introduce something that then becomes the de facto procedure of the House of Commons.

The House of Commons in normal times needs to look at its procedures and make decisions around them, but decisions around procedure during the pandemic should be very time-limited, strictly temporary and particularly to deal with the specifics of this pandemic. For example, one of the problems we had with the voting was the two-metre distance rule. If we'd had a different kind of pandemic where you didn't need to have a two-metre distance rule, then it may have been possible to continue with the way we normally vote in divisions.

Would it be helpful for me to give you a brief rundown of how our normal divisions work?

11:35 a.m.

Conservative

Eric Duncan Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON

Even to that point, actually, one of the big differences is how you vote. We usually do standing roll calls of all 338 MPs. You do it a bit differently, having 650 MPs. I wouldn't have the patience to do multiple votes as 650 of my colleagues went through.

Could you speak about what you did in terms of that voting, specifically regular voting, and then what was changed to accommodate that?

11:35 a.m.

Chair, Procedure Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Karen Bradley

Yes, of course. The normal way we vote is we have two rooms on either side of the chamber that you can't see, but they are behind the chamber. One is behind where the Prime Minister and the government MPs sit, and the other is behind where the opposition MPs sit. They are called the division lobbies. The aye lobby is on the government side. The no lobby is on the opposition side.

When a division is called, members of Parliament have eight minutes to get into one of those two rooms. The bell rings. It's like an old-fashioned school bell. Members then have eight minutes to get into either the aye lobby or the no lobby. You can imagine, with the size of Parliament, the size of our building, that can be quite time pressuring for people, but on the whole, members are very good at being able to get into the right division lobby at the right time.

Then what we do is congregate within that lobby. We go to three desks at the end of the lobby by our surnames. There's one A to F, I think it is, and G to L or whatever, and you have your name crossed off by the clerk. There's a clerk at each desk who then records that you voted, but the vote is the voice when we shout aye or no. The actual count happens as you leave the lobby.

The problem with our system is that the doors of the division lobby are reduced in size so only one person can get out at any one time. I would be delighted to give you a demonstration if you could ever get to the United Kingdom when we're allowed to do this. Then there are two people who stand on either side of the door, the tellers, and they count you.

Quite clearly the problem you have is that with only one person coming through at one time and two people standing right next to them, you cannot maintain social distancing between the tellers who do the counting, between members and the clerks who are crossing the names off and between the members themselves, because you get a bottleneck as people try to get through these lobbies. Bear in mind that for a division, you would probably have over 300 members in one lobby and around 250 to 260 in the other lobby. That would be the normal sorts of figures.

You can imagine that in eight minutes you congregate with everybody in a room that is the length of the chamber, but not as wide, and you are squashed in there. It's quite unpleasant in the summer, but it's a very good opportunity to see your colleagues. It is your chance to meet ministers. It is your chance to doorstep those people you need to speak to about matters, so it's very valued by colleagues. Members do not want to give up voting in the division lobby because of the access it gives them to colleagues. Clearly, in this pandemic with this situation, that kind of voting is simply not possible.

We looked at having staggered voting times, where perhaps we would have 10 minutes for each set of surnames to go through each lobby. We looked at other ways to do it, but it simply wasn't possible, and the public health advice was that this was congregating, and getting through this tiny gap to come out was the bit that causes a problem, so we then had to look at other ways to do it.

Of course, the original proposals made were that we would have remote electronic voting, which Matt and his team developed so fantastically. If you have seen the report my committee made on April 8, we said we didn't believe it was possible to have any form of remote electronic voting in place within four weeks. Not only did we have it but we were carrying out live divisions.

We still, of course, have a problem because we have now given up on the remote voting, and we are now having to vote in person. You will probably see the queues that have caused some of the problems with that.

11:35 a.m.

Conservative

Eric Duncan Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON

Yes. In a different room it seems to have worked, I think. You have more space now. You have the space to do that, and it's good to see that you have been able to maintain it.

11:35 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

That's all the time we have now.

11:35 a.m.

Conservative

Eric Duncan Conservative Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON

Thank you.

11:35 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Ruby Sahota

Next up we have Madam Petitpas Taylor, please.