Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 16th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

I call this meeting to order. Not only do we have quorum, but we have everyone here.

Welcome to meeting number nine of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. Pursuant to the order of reference of Saturday, April 11, the committee is meeting to discuss parliamentary duties in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before we start, I want to inform members that pursuant to the order of reference, the committee is meeting for two reasons: one, for the purpose of receiving evidence concerning matters related to the conduct of parliamentary duties in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; and two, to prepare and present a report to the House containing recommendations on how members can fulfill their parliamentary duties while the House stands adjourned on account of public health concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The order of reference also stipulates that only motions needed to determine witnesses and motions related to the adoption of the draft report are in order.

Today's meeting is taking place exclusively by teleconference, and the audio feed of our proceedings is made available via the House of Commons website.

In order to facilitate the work of our interpreters and ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow.

Before speaking, please wait until I have recognized you by name. When I recognize you by name, please unmute your telephone and begin to speak. There is no moderator on the call to unmute and mute the microphones; participants must do this themselves.

Members, should you want to request the floor, please unmute your microphone and signal this verbally to the chair. I am going to need a little bit of patience with this since I will not be able to see any hand signals. You are going to have to verbally indicate this to me, and I will do my best to keep the speaking order with the assistance of the clerk and try to call upon you in as orderly a fashion as possible.

When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly, and do not use your speaker-phone.

Should any technical challenges arise, in particular in relation to interpretation, please advise the chair, and the technical team will work to resolve the matter. Please note that we may need to suspend during these times, as we need to ensure that all members are able to participate fully.

With that being said, I believe we can begin this meeting. This meeting is going to begin informally, so we will not have our typical rounds from party to party. That will begin on Tuesday. Tuesday is when we hope to have the first set of witnesses called before us, and that will be a formal meeting with regard to the regular rounds of questions that we are used to.

Today's purpose, of course, is just to set out the framework of this study that we are about to undertake and to discuss different witnesses we would like to have called before this committee. We have about four or five meetings to try to complete this study before we have to start our work and submit the draft report to the analysts, so it's really important that we work efficiently, and hopefully we will be able to work collaboratively as well.

The clerk and I had a call and we also had a call with the vice-chairs of this committee yesterday to go over a few House rules. It was discussed in that meeting that it would be appropriate to call the Speaker and the Clerk of the House for the first meeting of witnesses, which will be this coming Tuesday. Other witnesses who could potentially be coming up would be other administrative witnesses, such as the law clerk or the IT administrative workers of the House. Of course, after those statements, I'm going to leave it up to you as to what you desire and whom you think it would be appropriate to call for the study.

I do remind you that our report is due back to the House on May 15. On May 15, we must have our final report adopted and submitted to the House.

That being said, I'd like to pass the floor over to the members so that we can engage in some collaborative work and try to get working as soon as possible on this study. Thank you.

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

This is Rachel. I'd love to be on the speakers list.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Okay, Rachel. Go ahead, please.

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

Thank you so much.

I agree about having the Speaker and the Clerk. They should be there. I just want to add that in the letter from the Speaker to the House about having a digital form of Parliament, he mentioned the creation of a team that would be helping to analyze the ability of the House to do that. I'm just wondering if we could have representatives from that team come in to talk to us about the work that they've already done.

I also maybe need some guidance from the clerk on one of the things I have some concerns about, and that's security for our members. If we're using different types of technology, will that alert people to exactly where the MPs are? I'm assuming that people will be working from their homes, so it's about safety, not only for MPs but for all the folks who are participating.

In terms of rural and remote communities, I think it would be informative to have a couple of members of Parliament—there are a couple I can recommend from our party—to address Internet access for a virtual sitting. I'm thinking of someone like Mumilaaq, who is not at home right now, but these things could be changing very rapidly. I think another part we have to study is the flexibility. If we are asked to go into isolation again, how do we pick up from where we left off? I think it would be good to have that.

Then, of course, I would like to hear from the private sector representatives. I believe the House is using Zoom, but there are other systems. I think we should be looking at those at well and seeing what the options are.

That's all I have to add for the moment. I'm looking forward to hearing other people's thoughts.

Oh, and let me add just one other part. Should we be discussing longer meetings to accommodate the reality that we have to get this done so quickly?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you, Ms. Blaney. Definitely I've had some thoughts as well about the meeting length, so maybe we could discuss that.

Before we do that, I think I forgot a couple of things. I would like to remind everyone that the witness lists are also due tomorrow. That's Friday by noon, preferably. Hopefully, we can resolve a lot of the witnesses on the call today. Then you will have some time with your parties and your teams to finalize those before submitting them.

The second reminder is that this is a public meeting. Usually when we're discussing witnesses it can go into in camera mode, but this meeting set-up for now will be completely public. That is a reminder to all members that this is a public meeting. As it stands right now, all our meetings might be public meetings unless there is a way to accommodate us in the future. That is, all witness meetings and even the draft report at this time may be in a public setting.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Hi, Ruby. This is Ginette. Could you put me on the list?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Absolutely, Ginette.

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

This is Mark. Could you add me too, Ruby?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Yes.

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

Madam Chair, could you add Blake Richards to the list as well?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

I will.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Add Kirsty Duncan, please.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

I will go to Ms. Petitpas Taylor for now, please.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Just very briefly, getting back to the possible witness list that we want to compile, we certainly recognize that COVID-19 is driving an unprecedented period of procedural experimentations across the world. I think it would be really interesting to be able to get perhaps a few individuals from other countries, perhaps someone from the U.K. Parliament or from other jurisdictions, just to see what they're doing to deal effectively with this really difficult period of time. If we could perhaps locate some individuals who would be able to appear, that would be great.

Finally, to Rachel Blaney's point with respect to extending our committee hours, I think a lot of important work needs to be done. I think we should really explore the possibility of perhaps expanding our committee hours to do this work.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you.

Next on the list I have Mr. Gerretsen and then Mr. Richards, and I believe I heard a voice that I could not identify. Who was that?

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Madam Chair, it was Kirsty Duncan.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Okay. Ms. Duncan. Perfect.

Mr. Gerretsen, go ahead, please.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I was going to continue on with what Ms. Petitpas Taylor said regarding people from other jurisdictions who have had the opportunity to experiment with virtual parliaments or virtual forums like this. I think it's imperative upon us to look for best practices to figure out the best way to do this so that we don't have to figure it out along the way ourselves.

I know that typically we submit names. I don't have any off the top of my head. I'm hoping our analysts can put together some potential names of experts who can advise on this.

We should also give some consideration to the times at which our meetings are taking place. When we're all in Ottawa, it's easy to have our meetings from 11:00 to 1:00. I'm curious if that meeting time still works, given the time changes throughout the country, and how that will impact members as well as potential witnesses.

I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you, Mr. Gerretsen.

Go ahead, Mr. Richards.

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

Thanks, Madam Chair. I have a few things.

First is a question probably for you, I suspect. For Tuesday's meeting with the Clerk and the Speaker, will the Clerk be bringing some other officials from the House of Commons with him, or is it just the Clerk alone?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Hold on a second and I'll try to get confirmation on that for you.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Justin Vaive]

As of right now, my understanding is that it's the Speaker and the Clerk. Frequently, however, when those types of witnesses appear, other officials from the House administration accompany them, just maybe not so much as witnesses. As of right now, it would be those two individuals, the Clerk and the Speaker of the House.

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

We may want to ask that other officials be brought with the Clerk. These are some of the folks we were thinking of: The law clerk might be advisable, and the assistants to the clerk for committees and legislative services, and for House proceedings, might both be valuable sources of information for us as well. It might be good to clarify who would be coming with them and make sure there isn't anyone left out who might be helpful to the committee. I will mention that.

Extending the number of meetings or the hours of meetings has been mentioned a couple of times. I'm certainly not opposed to that if it's necessary. Maybe it's putting the cart before the horse. We probably should establish the witnesses we want to see, how many there might be, and what areas they would be in. I guess then we could make decisions based on how much work we think we have ahead of us.

As far as the time of the meeting is concerned, being out west I guess there would be one time zone beyond mine. If it's 9 a.m for us here, it would be 8 a.m. in British Columbia. I don't see a problem with the time we're sitting at, other than, I suppose, that we all miss the daily updates from the Prime Minister, but I'm sure we have people who can brief us on what was said.

As far as the witnesses themselves are concerned, we may want to try to group them into a number of categories, because I think there are some very obvious areas that we will want to explore when we're looking at ways the House could sit differently.

I think the first one would be looking at procedural, legal and constitutional questions around that. There would be some fairly obvious witnesses who could be brought forward beyond the current officials, such as experts from days gone by, I suppose, who would have a considerable amount of expertise but are not in the game now. They would have opinions, I'm sure, about what could be possible. I'm thinking about former clerks, former speakers, people like that.

Another good grouping would be, obviously, around the very idea of feasibility. There are probably a number of experts to suggest there, who would be able to give us some thoughts about the feasibility of different things we might be considering. Another area we would want to explore would be security and whether there are any security questions around any of the possible ideas.

I think the idea that was raised a couple of times already about looking at other legislatures' experiences is a good one. I would suggest that we either seek senior officials from those jurisdictions, or if we are going to have representatives, elected officials.... The U.K. example was mentioned already. Obviously, there are some differences of opinion among their officials about what should happen there. I think government members want the idea of a virtual question period. I think there's some opposition to that from the opposition parties, or at least the main opposition party. If we're going to seek elected officials, we should probably make sure we have both perspectives represented.

There has been a lot of focus on the idea of virtual sittings. We should also have some people talk to us about other alternatives to virtual sittings. Obviously, we would look at the Public Health Agency and emergency preparedness experts. Things like that would be good there.

I have some suggestions we have put together in all these different areas, but I think those would be appropriate considerations we should be looking at. We should probably try to make sure we have witnesses to give us some thoughts and advice from all those different perspectives before we move forward with anything.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you, Mr. Richards. Those were very good suggestions.

I did mention at the beginning the law clerks and the legislative teams. Would you like them all in the first meeting, or would you like to see them spaced out?

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

If we're going to use the first meeting as an opportunity to gauge where things are now and what might be possible, it would be good to have a number of the officials together. We may want to leave open the possibility of having them come back later on.

We may find that we have some questions now, but then we'll hear from others about modality, feasibility issues and security issues. We might want to come back with questions that we aren't thinking about now, but which may come up based on what we hear in testimony or in questioning witnesses. At that point, we may want to bring back the officials from the House of Commons to ask them those questions that have come up through the course of the study.

That would be my thinking. Bring them all in now, but then we may want to bring all of them, or some of them, back for additional questions later.