Thank you for your question, Mr. Dalton.
What I can say to this is that there's a big difference between being online and being in the room with everyone, as I'm sure you've noticed. Everybody can't wait to get together again.
It has made our work more difficult in that, first of all, interpretation is teamwork. We're usually a team of three, and we help each other out. For instance, if we're doing the finance committee and we're listening to briefs and interpreting briefs at a gazillion miles an hour, our colleagues in the booth will jot down numbers so that we say “billions”, not “millions” or “thousands”, and get the numbers right, which is a challenge.
The problem now is that we are all separated, all working alone in one booth on our own, because of COVID-19. On top of which, we go to the Hill and we have the technical support team, but everyone is remote.
We do have a few MPs coming back to the Hill now, so the sound that we are getting, we are getting from different inputs. We are getting it from Zoom, we're getting it from the MPs in the meeting room and we are getting it from people who are online and not using the proper equipment. There's a lot of variability in the sound that is coming through on a platform that, as we've pointed out, is not meeting our requirements in terms of intelligibility.