Good morning, Madam Chair, Vice-Chairs and members of the committee.
My colleague Jennifer Stewart and I are pleased to be here with you to express our thoughts on a hybrid Parliament with you today. Thank you for the invitation.
Jennifer and I are going to be sharing our time, but we are also the co-founders of The Honest Talk, which is a podcast aimed at telling the stories of female leaders across Canada from a variety of spheres of influence. We are also mothers and communications entrepreneurs.
We're delighted to be here with all of you today.
We'd like to begin by underlining our belief that continuing to embrace a hybrid approach for the House of Commons is not a partisan issue. Rather, it is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to attract to public service more women, more people from diverse backgrounds and more individuals from various regions of the country, and that can only strengthen democracy.
We all know that our governance structures are enhanced by diversity. We know that more voices in a room, voices representing different lived experiences, lead to overall stronger outcomes, whether that room is a boardroom, a classroom, a committee room or the seat of our Canadian democracy, the House of Commons.
However, up until the past two years, our governance structures have functioned on a one-size-fits-all approach—in person or nothing—and that approach, in our opinion, is the enemy of diversity. That is why we are firmly in support of a hybrid House of Commons.
It is 2022. We live in an age that puts a paramount and justified focus on fostering and ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion. Given that, why would we not strive to make our seat of democracy the most accessible, equitable place that it can be?
Over the past 31 months, we’ve seen businesses, organizations and governments propelled into a new way of doing things that would have been unimaginable before COVID‑19. Most went entirely virtual, and successfully made that transition. And then they went hybrid, because that’s what their modern workforce required.
This begs the question, why should members of Parliament always be required to fly, take the train or drive to Ottawa to partake in parliamentary business? If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that doing things one way because that's how we've always done them is neither efficient nor reflective of our new reality.