We have now lived through two weeks of "virtual" meetings of the House of Commons' Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Parliament is not better off for it. While some are treating this as a kind of beta-test for how rules could be adapted to full "virtual" sittings of the Commons, the early results of this experiment have not been promising, and already show signs that the kind of social contagion that comes from MPs no longer being face-to-face manifesting itself. And more to the point, we have been learning about how much more taxing these "virtual" meetings are on the staff that parliamentarians rely on, leaving one to question whether the benefit we're seeing is worth the cost.
While the very first "virtual" meeting was conducted with a bit of grace and a tiny dose of humility, where the novelty seemed to give MPs a moment's pause and created a momentary impetus to act more like grown-ups, particularly with more thoughtful questions than we are used to. That lasted a day. By the next "virtual" meeting, the tone was immediately one where MPs felt emboldened to lace their questions with personal insults, and to break the parliamentary rules against having props by posting signs in their backgrounds that were very much attacks on the government. This past Thursday's meeting had several instances of not only MPs whinging that they were shorted several seconds in their question rounds, while others were trying to game the rule that the Chair was trying to enforce about questions and answers being the same length by rapidly peppering short questions that didn't allow for proper answers.
While the online commentariat and more than a few pundits have praised the general lack of heckling in this "virtual" setting, I suspect that has helped to embolden some of the nastiness that emerged rather quickly. In the House of Commons, if you lob insults across the floor, you will create a fuss, and the Speaker will be forced to respond. That generally hasn't happened here. On Thursday, when Elizabeth May raised a point of order regarding unparliamentary language when she was the subject of some of these barbs something that one couldn't do in Question Period, incidentally Conservative MPs kept trying to drown her out by unmuting and shouting "debate!" over and over (while the screen kept flipping rapidly between these various MPs in rapid succession). The Chair offered a mild chiding that MPs should be respectful to one another, but this is certainly an example of the very heckling that people clutch their pearls over actually can serve the function of a certain level of policing of behaviour.
The other thing about this that bears mentioning is the notion that I suspect that some of the dickish behaviour stems from the fact that the MPs who are making these personal jabs don't need to look the other person in the eye and no, doing it over Zoom is not the same thing. We all know how people are can be much more vicious in dealing with a person over the phone and say things that they never would in person and I see that happening here as well. It's also one of the biggest cautions against trying to make these kinds of virtual situations permanent that it would embolden this behaviour because MPs aren't seeing one another face-to-face. We saw the death of collegiality between MPs across the aisle when they ended evening sittings in the early 1990s under the rubric of being more "family friendly," because that meant that MPs were no longer having dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week, where they formed bonds, and where they could look past their partisan stripes. Those opportunities are few and far between these days, where staffers will go so far as to police MPs from socializing with "the enemy" (as reported in the Samara Canada exit interview series). Making virtual sittings the norm would make it even easier for MPs to treat one another as the enemy and not as human beings with a different partisan stripe.
The other thing we've learned this week is that these "virtual" meetings are taking a greater toll on the staff that parliamentarians rely on most especially the interpreters, who are already short-staffed because many of them can't work because they can't get child care, and where the greater cognitive load that these Zoom meetings has on them means they are burning out and facing injuries at a much higher rate. Part of the Liberal government's insistence on holding these meetings virtually was that it didn't mean exposing staff in the buildings, but that excuse was always disingenuous. Those staff need to be there whether MPs are present or not because they can't run these "virtual" meetings from home, and if the remote meetings are harder on them than the in-person sittings, it blows apart the justification that virtual meetings are somehow protecting them.
It's also important to remember that we are facing yet more emergency legislation in the coming days about more measures that have been announced, and this is where it becomes even more important that we get some kind of proper legislative scrutiny of this bill, and not just another incidence of a bill pre-negotiated and pre-amended with no public debate or transparency, and for it to be passed all in one stage. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that in-person skeletal sittings work, and that they can be done safely, both for the MPs and the staff. If we were doing these thrice weekly, we would cut down on the travel that MPs would be doing in fact, keeping these sittings going would allow those MPs to stay in Ottawa for the duration and create a "bubble" here that would be far safer for them and those around them. We wouldn't be taxing the interpreters as badly, and it would take the pressure off of the IT staff that could be redeployed to keeping the other committees in both chambers going. Parliament would function better, and Canadians would be better off for it, and I think it's irresponsible to keep kludging this special committee for diminishing returns.
Photo Credit: CBC News
