It was not the fight that it should have been, as first thing Monday morning, the opposition parties all largely caved to the Liberals' demands that any ongoing sittings of the House of Commons that could happen in a virtual or hybrid capacity should also include the use of the remote voting app.  While the full rollout of the app has been delayed briefly, while they await final testing, the fact remains that precedence is being set, and the Liberals' five-year-long battle to open this particular Pandora's Box has been won, and the evil within is escaping into the world.  Parliament will be screwed for a generation, if not more, thanks to what happened on Monday.

While many have been quick to excuse what has happened as being a necessity of the pandemic, and comforting themselves with the notion that this order expires at the end of June, and is only for the duration of COVID, they are kidding themselves if they think this is temporary.  This was certainly not a necessity the rollcalls over Zoom were a workable solution that were already going to be problematic, but the least evil of all hybrid voting solutions because it wasn't going to create an expectation or normalize the use of such an app.  It's the very definition of the Liberals not letting a good crisis going to waste.

In fact, it would have been better for all involved in Parliament had agreed to a strategy of using a "parliamentary bubble" to conduct its sittings given that it would have allowed for the best outcomes, not only in terms of the legislative process, but the ancillary activities of parliament as well, all of which are becoming severely stressed under the current circumstances and it wouldn't be causing the corps of interpreters to be suffering auditory and cognitive injuries like they are thanks to the hybrid sittings, which MPs seem not to care about.  But MPs and many Senators have decided that they would rather stress our parliamentary institutions by staying home rather than doing the more responsible thing of creating a bubble, mostly because the bubble would inconvenience them.

There are several reasons why the decision to use a voting app is an abomination, and none of them are around cyber-security.  Yes, they have devised a very clever system where the app requires both fingerprint ID and takes a photo of the MP as they cast their vote that can be compared to one on record so that they can be assured that it's really them casting the vote, but that is less the issue.  One of the big issues is the way in which this interacts with the parliamentary privileges associated with MPs voting there is a particular value in seeing them vote in the Chamber, where you can see that they are unimpeded, or that they are not being coerced to vote in a certain way.  While dramatic, and based on the problems of the ages where kings held a lot more sway, it is necessarily part of the traditions that make up our parliamentary system.  The Zoom rollcall provides a bit more of this sense, because you can at least see the MPs for the duration of the vote (as it is a stipulation that they must have their cameras turned on the whole time), but the app does away with this.

Another problem is that there is tremendous symbolic weight in having an MP literally stand up for their beliefs during a roll-call vote, and this cannot be discounted.  Parliamentary symbols matter a great deal to the whole point of the institution, and that's why efforts to circumvent them need to be resisted vigorously.  MPs have long complained that they should be able to vote electronically in order to save time because roll-call votes do take time but when you consider that voting is one of their primary duties as an MP in Ottawa, the fact that it takes time is part of the point and should not be minimized.  We have also seen plenty of examples in other countries where they have instituted electronic voting where it has been abused by parties, and this opens up the door to further abuses, regardless of the technological gatekeeping they have instituted.

Part of the Liberals' five-year crusade to implement hybrid sittings and remote voting have been made under the rubric that it will help make Parliament more "family-friendly," but this should be a warning sign.  Previous attempts at making a more "family-friendly" environment have had disastrous consequences, such as the decision to eliminate evening sittings.  Prior to that, MPs would all have dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week, and then return to the Chamber to debate for several more hours afterward.  The result was that time spent together created a sense of collegiality, especially amongst members from different parties.  They could verbally spar on the floor of the Commons, and have a drink together after.  That sense of collegiality is nearly extinct because MPs barely spend any time socializing with one another, especially across party lines, unless there is a committee that travels, and even then, they have staffers determined to keep them apart so as not to consort with the "enemy."  This has helped turn Parliament into the toxic environment it is now.

With hybrid sittings and remote voting normalized by the time this pandemic is over, there is no way that MPs will relinquish these "innovations."  They will begin making excuses to keep them in place, for parental leave, then for "work-life balance issues," and finally, because they have "so much work to do" in their constituencies, and by then, Parliament will be depopulated.  MPs will travel a couple of times a year, and otherwise appear remotely, and the real value of being able to converse on the sidelines of committees or in corridors will evaporate, and what little collegiality remains will blow away like tumbleweeds as each side remains firmly in their own camp, unable to interact outside of partisan theatre.  As well, it makes the job of the press that much harder than it already is because there will be no opportunities to button-hole MPs as they will simply be absent.

We already got a taste of this on Monday, as the Liberals only sent a single MP to the Chamber for Question Period under the rubric of "setting an example," rather than treating Parliament like an essential institution.  There is an underlying contempt for Parliament in these actions, and it will only solidify now that they have opened the way for this to become a permanent state of being.