Seeing that it's 11 o'clock, I call this meeting to order.
Welcome to meeting number 20 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of January 25, 2021. Therefore, members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. Please be aware the webcast will always show the person speaking, rather than the entirety of the committee.
Today's meeting is also taking place in the new webinar format. Webinars are for public committee meetings and are available only to members, their staff and witnesses. Members may have remarked that the entry to the meeting was much quicker and that they immediately entered as an active participant. All functionalities for active participants remain the same. Staff will be non-active participants only and can therefore only view the meeting in gallery view. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind all the participants of this meeting that screenshots or taking photos of your screen is not permitted.
Given the ongoing pandemic situation and in light of the recommendations from health authorities to remain healthy and safe, all those attending the meeting in person are to maintain a two-metre physical distance and must wear a non-medical mask while circulating in the room. It is highly recommended that the mask be worn at all times, including when seated. You must maintain proper hand hygiene by using the hand sanitizer provided at the entrance of the room. I will be enforcing these measures for the duration of the meeting. I thank the members in advance for their co-operation.
For those participating virtually, I'd like to outline a few rules to follow.
Members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of “floor”, “English” or “French”. With the latest Zoom version, you may now speak in the language of your choice without the need to select the corresponding language channel.
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For members participating in person, proceed as you usually would when the whole committee is meeting in person in the committee room. Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on the video conference please click on your microphone icon to unmute yourself.
I think you guys know the rest of it. There's not really anyone in the room today, so we'll move on and I'll introduce the witnesses that we have for today.
We have three witnesses. We have Professor Ian Brodie, associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary. We have Lori Turnbull, associate professor and director of the school of public administration at Dalhousie University. We also have Professor Hugo Cyr, department of legal science, Université du Québec à Montréal.
We will start with Professor Brodie.
Professor Brodie does have a hard cut-off at 11:20. Seeing as it is 11:03, I was wondering if the committee would like to hear his opening remarks. If there are any specific questions to Professor Brodie, we can have those questions first and then we'll get into our regular rounds of questions with the other two witnesses.
What do you think about that? Would you like to hear from all three witnesses and then start formal rounds?