The House of Commons took another step toward normalizing hybrid sittings in a permanent way last week when all of the House Leaders from the various parties gave their sign-off for the remote voting app to begin operating in earnest.  At the same time, an independent senator asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to cost out the savings of making hybrid sittings permanent once the pandemic is over, and he very much obliged.  What was largely absent from the report, however, was the human toll that these sittings take on staff and most especially the interpreters that our parliament depends on.  The longer these sittings carry on, the more I worry that our MPs and senators are ignoring the human cost of their unwillingness to suck up their intransigence to simply staying in Ottawa for longer stretches during the pandemic.

There is a basic awareness that the interpreters that Parliament relies on are suffering burnout and acoustic and cognitive injuries as a result of working over Zoom, and yet our parliamentarians can't seem to care about this.  Every few minutes, the Commons Speaker gently chides MPs to properly adjust their headset microphones, and to practice proper mute and unmute behavior, but it keeps happening, months after these hybrid sessions began.  No matter how many times the Speaker says "this makes it very hard on the interpretation staff that we rely on," MPs simply do not get the message, and it keeps happening, and lo, our interpreters are suffering as a result.

The Official Languages Committee just last week called on the government to pause the contract procedures for freelance interpreters of which they cite there are only about 80 qualified in all of Canada for this essential work because their safety is being compromised by conducting these hybrid sittings over Zoom.

A press release by the International Association of Conference Interpreters summarised it as such:

The suspected culprit is compressed and modified sound delivered by ZOOM.  The sound it delivers to interpreters is not intelligible enough to hear speakers and talk over them at the same time in another language.  The strain of trying to do so is causing concussion-like injuries such as headaches, extreme fatigue, tinnitus and other auditory conditions.

The Committee heard testimony from the federal Translation Bureau that more than 70% of its staff interpreters have reported these and other injuries since the spring last year.  As a result, the Translation Bureau is recruiting freelancers in greater numbers to reinforce interpretation of the proceedings of Parliament and other federal institutions.

The Association also published their own report into how these hybrid sittings are going, and the over 1000 technical and translation-related interruptions that these debates suffered between April and December of last year, which has a dramatic impact on the practice of bilingualism in Parliament, and in citing the 70 percent of interpreters suffering injuries from the work, listed the effects as "tinnitus, nausea, headache and fatigue severe enough to require time off the job to recover."

The PBO's report, however, barely mentions the human cost as it calculates the "savings" from these hybrid sittings.  "Virtual interpretation causes more fatigue to interpreters, who must work shorter shifts, as well as an increase in acoustic injuries.  The Translation Bureau, which provides interpretation services to Parliament, has hired additional interpreters on- contract to support its operation because of these issues."

Given that there are so few qualified interpreters in the country as it is, I remain mystified as to why MPs and senators remain bound and determined to burn them out and cause them consistent injuries, unless you realize that MPs don't think about these interpreters as anything other than part of the furniture, or the household help at best.  It would certainly help to explain why no amount of gentle chiding by the Speaker has had any measurable effect on MPs' behaviour, or why certain MPs rail over social media when committee meetings need to be suspended because there aren't any more interpreters available to do the tasks.

I have tried to think of another analogous situation where a group of highly skilled professionals would be asked to constantly put their health and safety in danger so that a group of ostensible elites wouldn't have to be so put out as to stay in one place for several weeks at a time, and yet here we are.  MPs could be avoiding this whole situation if they would just accept creating a parliamentary bubble so that sittings could carry on as close to normally as possible in the pandemic, even though it would mean a modicum of sacrifice in not being able to return home as often as they might like, and yet they refuse.  Instead, they rather self-righteously pat themselves on the back for "setting a good example" of staying at home, rather than showing that Parliament continues to function in the face of the situation that we find ourselves in.

And rest assured, there will be yet more calls to make this state of affairs permanent, especially now that there is this PBO report.  Ironically, many of the cost savings associated with travel or with the associated GHG emissions could be addressed if MPs would have longer sitting seasons in Ottawa, and reduce their travel rather than simply showing up in Ottawa for three, maybe four days in a week as so many MPs would do in normal times.  But now that these remote sittings are being normalized, the demands for them will only increase, to the detriment of the human cost to those who make these sittings happen.  The fact that MPs and senators are shrugging this cost off, and callously carrying on in ways that only serve to continue to injure these interpreters makes me wonder if we should be pointing out the morality of this ongoing situation, and why these interpreters are being made to suffer these injuries for the sake of these MPs avoiding the "indignity" of having to stay in Ottawa.  Is the cost really worth it?  Does it even register on their conscience?

Photo Credit: CBC News