Yes.
This reflects concerns that we see in other options that are used in Westminster in London, such as pairing, where one member who can't be present would be be paired with somebody else so that you would keep the partisan balance the same on a vote.
I wrote about the problem we have with that with my colleague Dr. Amanda Bittner at Memorial. We wrote something about this in the Canadian Parliamentary Review. It's specifically with respect to the parental leave policy that's now in place for the Canadian House of Commons and about how these options feel like they're less appropriate. What it means is it's taking that representational voice for at least one member of Parliament, or several, out of the mix.
If you had a remote voting option and a member was in the constituency because they were receiving treatment for a medical condition or had just had a labour and delivery, or a disaster had happened in the community—as you had mentioned—or there was something very compelling to keep them there, either personal, representational or otherwise, then they would still have the option to be able to come in and do some part of the House duties that are also part of their job.
The other thing that comes to my mind about this is how the options for being absent from the legislature are so slow to be updated in Canada, precisely because people who are pregnant.... You can tell that they've just never had to deal with somebody who's had to leave because of a labour and delivery. They're not sick.
I know that in Alberta, the Alberta legislature didn't address this issue. There's a 10-day permitted absence unless there's an illness. They had to change it to include pregnancy, because the existing measure wasn't appropriate. It strikes me as a holistic way to think about what's going on in people's lives.
Also, it's a good opportunity to think about what's going on with constituency representation and how that can be better balanced to accommodate work in the House as well.
The thing that would be disheartening for us would be if it would devolve into some of the existing patterns that we think create some of the things that we identify in the literature as dysfunction in terms of how the institution works.