Thank you very much, Chair Chagger.
Good afternoon. I'm Ted Arnott. I'm the member of provincial Parliament for Wellington—Halton Hills and the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
I'm glad to have this opportunity to address the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs in discussing our parliamentary proceedings during the COVID-19 pandemic and how we responded here at Queen's Park.
Like all Canadians who were asked to begin working from home in March of 2020, the Ontario legislature similarly adjourned its business until such time that the government House leader indicated to me, as Speaker, that it was in the public interest for members to reconvene.
When they did so, on May 12, 2020, the House adopted a motion that allowed committees to use electronic means of communication when they were authorized to resume meetings. The motion specified that committee members, witnesses and/or staff would not be required to be in the same physical place. This allowed for remote committee participation by members and staff without the need to be physically present in a committee room at Queen's Park, which was unprecedented at the time at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.
While committees were authorized to meet virtually, the chamber proceedings remained in person throughout, with some modifications to the voting procedures and the number of members present in the chamber, in line with the public health advice we were receiving from Ontario's chief medical officer of health. Therefore, the bulk of this presentation will focus on committees, as they did have some hybrid components.
In total, the nine standing committees and one select committee conducted 328 meetings in the hybrid virtual format before returning to exclusively in-person meetings as of March 1, 2022, this year.
Hybrid committee meetings were still anchored in a committee room in the Legislative Building with the chair, acting chair and a committee clerk required to be physically present. Zoom was selected as the hosting platform for these hybrid committee meetings. An assembly staff from different branches worked together to conduct exhaustive testing in preparation for the change. Security, connectivity, user experience and ease were all tested at various times.
Guideline documents, manuals and tip sheets were developed for members, staff and witnesses in order to ease the transition to the new format. Each committee room was fitted with four TVs and extra cameras so that all participants in the room could view all the remote participants. In keeping with physical distancing best practices, members and staff present in the committee rooms were encouraged to sit apart from one another. Furthermore, each committee agreed that the members of the public attending as witnesses should appear virtually.
Each committee held a pre-meeting of 15 minutes before their scheduled start time for the chair to confirm the attendance of all members participating by Zoom and work out any technical difficulties that might have arisen.
All Zoom participants, excluding MPPs, were required to join an administrative confirmation meeting hosted on a separate Zoom call by a procedural services assistant. The assistant confirmed the participants' identification, conducted a technical audio and video quality check and then provided the main committee Zoom link to join the meeting. This ensured that only registered participants had access to the committee's Zoom meeting link, and it enhanced the security of the meeting.
Over time, as the use of Zoom became the norm, the role of the administrative clerk was no longer needed. However, the practice of conducting an administrative confirmation meeting for all external participants was maintained, as it had been effective in ensuring secure meetings.
Committees also began using their SharePoint site to securely distribute all relevant committee documents to members. This included written submissions, notices, agendas and even confidential committee documents. The site prompted members to log in with their personal assembly credentials to access the documents to which they would have “view only” access.
The order of the House that allowed for hybrid committee meetings provided that the chair would ensure that the Standing Orders and regular committee practices were observed to the greatest extent possible, making adjustments to committee procedures only where necessary to facilitate the physical distancing and electronic participation of members, witnesses and staff.
Adjusted committee procedures included the confirmation of identity and presence in Ontario. The chair was required, by order of the House, to verify the identity of members participating remotely and confirm they were physically present in Ontario, in order for them to be considered to be in attendance and part of the quorum. This was largely done during the pre-meeting, but it was also done during committee proceedings, as necessary.