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

As we close in on the one-year mark of the global pandemic, it has become clear that there is a pervasive belief that the prime minister has super powers or rather, that he should, if he just wishes hard enough for something to happen.  As it turns out, there's a term for this in the United States known as the Green Lantern Theory, stemming from the comic book character (and film of the same name, starring Canadian Ryan Reynolds) whose green ring is capable of creating green energy projections whose only limits are the wearer's willpower and imagination.  The political theory, of course, is that a president can achieve any political or policy objective if he only tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.  Sound familiar in our own context?

The theory, articulated by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, actually comes in two variants the Reagan version, and the LBJ version.  In the former, if the president can only communicate well enough, the public will rally to his side; in the latter, the president only needs to try harder to win over congress to vote through his agenda.  Neither of those are quite specific enough to the current Canadian context, where prime minister Justin Trudeau only needs to try hard enough to magically solve the problems facing this country.

For example, if you listen to the Conservatives, if Trudeau simply tried harder, he could make Pfizer's vaccine plant retooling happen faster, or immediately solve Moderna's supply chain issues, and we could have enough vaccine for the entire country in the blink of an eye.  Or if he tried hard enough, he could force President Biden to change his mind on the Keystone XL pipeline (though the Conservatives also seem to believe that the prime minister also needs to throw more public temper tantrums, and make performative displays of screaming and crying to show the Americans, or pharmaceutical company CEOs for that matter, that he's really serious).

For the NDP, they seem to believe that if Trudeau tries hard enough and exerts more willpower, he can overcome any barrier in the constitution and override provincial jurisdiction, whether that's on rent, paid sick leave, pharmacare, dental coverage, or long-term care.  It's not that it would be unconstitutional, or that it would poison the well of federalism, or that he would be declaring war on the provinces he simply doesn't care enough about those issues to exert that much willpower that his green ring will make these magical policies happen.  And so on.

While Green Lantern Theory emerged in the US as part of the popular imagination that the executive is far more powerful than it actually is (structurally, it's very weak because of the way their constitution was framed), in Canada, that doesn't quite hold because our executive is far more powerful most especially if there is a majority parliament, though that isn't the current make-up of the House of Commons.  Nevertheless, in the current pandemic context where all of the attention has been focused on the prime minister (to the detriment of premiers, who should be held to greater account given that they have much more responsibility for healthcare and lockdown orders), Green Lantern Theory seems to be emerging out of frustration with federalism, particularly given that we are bombarded with constant demands for Trudeau to invoke the Emergencies Act to take over areas of provincial jurisdiction.

Of course, just as Green Lantern Theory falls apart in the US once it comes into contact with the realities of their congressional system, so too does it fall apart in Canada when confronted with the fact that even though our executive is stronger, the number of levers available to the federal government are particularly limited.  There is no invoking the Emergencies Act because, aside from going to war with provinces who want no part of it, we haven't even met the basic threshold in the definition in the Act of what constitutes a national emergency, which is that the urgent and critical situation endangering the lives, health or safety of Canadians "is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it."  The capacity or authority of the provinces has not been exceeded.  The only thing that is lacking is the political will of premiers to take the necessary actions, whether it's rent relief, paid sick leave, or instituting proper lockdowns to prevent transmission of the virus.

Because Trudeau has demonstrated a willingness to do what is necessary to get Canadians through this pandemic, and spend any amount of money, there seems to be a belief that this can somehow extend to all areas, even those outside of his jurisdiction.  And to his credit, he has certainly attempted to fill gaps where they appear, such as kludging together the federal sickness benefit where provinces won't implement paid sick leave, or similarly in kludging disability benefits from what few levers he has available.  But because he is bound by those few levers the federal government has at his disposal, he has raised expectations that he can do more if he simply has enough willpower, which isn't how this works.  The constitution is a very real thing that prevents him from reaching into provinces' areas of jurisdiction.

The prime minister doesn't have unlimited powers, and it would be a very bad thing if he did.  He is not constrained by the limits of his willpower he is constrained by a constitution and a federal structure that is one of the most decentralized in the world.  Falling into Green Lantern Theory is both delusional in believing that politics works in a way that is divorced from reality, but when employed by opposition party leaders, it is also a cynical exercise in trying paint the government as being unwilling to take actions that they simply cannot do, and is making promises that these other leaders could not keep.  Justin Trudeau does not have a magic green ring we need to stop pretending otherwise.

Photo Credit: The Things