Procedure and House Affairs Committee on July 6th, 2020

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

Earlier, you spoke about being ready for September 21, so it sounds like testing for the process is also part of the timeline you've outlined.

[Stéphan Aubé]

Absolutely, it would be. It would need to be.

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

Okay, that helps a lot.

I'm just wondering if there has been any thought put into.... Once this is implemented, will there be a continuous review process? Because things change, I'm curious if, in your plan, you've looked at how we will review. I think this is important because of the reality that there is so much we don't know. Probably one of the most frustrating parts of living through COVID-19 is that things are changing continuously. I think all of us wish it would go back to what we were used to in the past, but it's just not there yet.

As we go through this process, I'm wondering if we will have a process where we can review it. Would that go through the whip's office, for example? Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Stéphan Aubé]

If the committee asked the House to build a product for voting.... This is a standard practice that must exist in the life cycle of a product, such as a voting product. Since you would be the main users of this product, there would definitely be a need for continuously improving the product based on members' feedback.

The usual approach that we've taken in the past.... When we need to engage members, we usually do this through the whip's office. We basically seek, through the whip's office, identification of members with the proper representation from all the parties, and then we work with this group of members. We've done that in the past for the constituency offices, for example the standards that we established for the constituency offices. We worked with the whip's office to identify members and do some testing. We've done that also with the new Office 365 for the new members. We asked the whips to identify key members to work with.

This is standard practice, Madam Blaney. We would certainly like to see as a recommendation from the committee, if you decide to move forward, that we engage the members, because this is the only way we can make the experience successful.

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

Thank you.

I see my time is almost up, but I want to say that during COVID my office moved to a new location, and the House was amazing in helping us get everything set up during that time. I just want to say thank you to all of you, because you're doing tremendous work and I think all of us are incredibly grateful.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you, Ms. Blaney. You're absolutely correct.

Next up, from the Conservatives, will be Mr. Richards.

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

Thank you.

I had some very similar questions to Ms. Blaney's, in regard to the committees, and you did have a chance to answer most of what I wanted answered. Obviously, it would be a real concern that committees wouldn't all be able to meet in September if things move ahead in a virtual way at that time.

The one thing that you didn't really cover, on that point, on the capacity issues that we've had with committees and all of that.... I guess there are a couple of things I wanted to ask, in addition to what you've already had a chance to respond to.

First, you already indicated that you couldn't really tells us whether we would be in a position to have all the committees meet in September. That would be a real concern, I think, but if there are to be full-day virtual or hybrid sittings, what kind of impact would that have on the committee capacity? Is there a potential that we could even see a reduced committee capacity over what we have now?

Second, I know that one of the issues with capacity has been around scheduling the caucus meetings. If we were to have a sort of regular sitting week schedule, whether it be virtual or hybrid, would there be the ability to support all four caucus meetings simultaneously on Wednesday mornings, or would there have to be adjustments made there?

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

The caucus meetings themselves, if they're all happening at the same time and there are no committee meetings, obviously there's no problem in getting them service. That would not be much of an issue. That would work fairly well.

As for the resources and having to reduce the number of committees, again, I think Monsieur Aubé would probably best answer this, but overall what I've noticed with staff here is that it's amazing. Every time there's a challenge or a wall put up, they do hurdles over it. I mean, they just jump right over it and go on to the next step, almost as if it wasn't there. I have a lot of faith and hope in the ability of our staff.

Maybe I'll let Monsieur Aubé comment on that a little bit more. My answer is based on past experience. I'll let him answer with the actual resources that he has to work with.

[Stéphan Aubé]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The goal, Mr. Richards.... As you know, from a scheduling perspective, for committees, the approach was that we could schedule up to six committees in parallel, pre-COVID. Currently, as you know, we have windows that are smaller than that, basically due to the number of people who were available to us at the beginning.

The tight time frames also.... In order to implement this infrastructure, because it was a little bit new, in the facility we had to reconfigure some of the infrastructure within the committees to make this happen. We also had a skill set issue. Having said that, over the last weeks we've been building on that and adapting in order to increase our capacity.

That's what we're looking at for the fall. We're basically seeing where the pain points are that we have right now in order to plan, if possible, recognizing that all of this is going to be based on what happens from here to September, from an environment perspective. If everything is okay, we're looking at making the decisions in order to bring back the number of committees that we can bring back, sir.

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

Okay. I understand that you're not able to tell us that we could absolutely have a full committee complement. Is there a chance that if there were full-day sittings, a regular weekly schedule but done virtually or in a hybrid way, we might see a reduced capacity for committees at this point, or do you see no concern there?

[Stéphan Aubé]

If the COVID environment remains the same, I don't see a reduction of committees, at least from my team and my team's ability to support you in the committees, from that perspective. If the COVID environment doesn't change, I wouldn't see a reduction. That wouldn't impact our capability in a way that it would reduce our ability to support you in the number of committees, sir.

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

Okay. So, at the end of the day, the bottom line is that we shouldn't see a reduction in the number of committees if there are to be full-day sittings, but we're not certain we'd be able to increase it to the level that would be ordinarily expected.

[Stéphan Aubé]

We're striving for that, sir. We're striving to bring it back to where it was previously.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you.

Next up we have Mr. Gerretsen.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I just have a couple of questions, so I might not take the whole time.

Mr. Speaker, I'll just build on Mr. Tochor's questions. Mr. Tochor raised a good point about people perhaps being in different locations, maybe on a beach in Florida. In the time that we've been doing the COVID-19 meetings, the hybrid meetings, are we aware of any member of Parliament who has been outside of the country while doing that?

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

I'm aware of only one.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

And who would that be?

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Ms. Rempel was down in Oklahoma, I believe.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Oh wow, I didn't know that.

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

She's been participating in all the virtual meetings quite actively, so it's been working out well. Where they're located, really, unless the House wants to get into that, I'm not sure that's something pertinent, as long as they—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

You know, Mr. Tochor raised a concern over it. Perhaps it is something that we should consider in our recommendations—that you have to be at least within the country of Canada to be participating in our democratic process.

Also, Mr. Tochor said, perhaps anecdotally, what if somebody was at a pub down the street? How do we know they're not voting from there?

Are you able to say with some degree of certainty, Mr. Speaker, that no member of Parliament has ever cast a vote while under the influence of alcohol?

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

I don't know. I can't say for sure one way or the other.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Okay.

One last thing he said was about perhaps spending money on an app that we never end up using. My thought on that is.... Would you agree that there are a lot of things we spend money on that perhaps we hope we never have to use? We hope we never have to use the Parliamentary Protective Service, but we still need to have it there in case we need to use it. We hope that we never have an incident that requires its usage, but we accept the fact that there is a risk and therefore we should be investing in mitigating that risk.

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

That's certainly a point of view.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

The last thing I'll ask is just to jump back to the previous round of questioning. I asked you.... I'm not trying to interject you into the political decision-making on this, but Mr. Aubé did touch on this with another set of questions. Is there a preferred method that's been discussed within the clerk's office, in the discussions about voting, in terms of the ease of voting? What would be the easiest way of doing it, whether it would be through Zoom or an app or anything like that? Has there been any discussion that's led to that?