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Tag: hybrid sittings

With the return of Parliament for the fall sitting comes the renewed cries for changes to improve it as a “workplace.” The executive director of the Samara Centre for Democracy, citing interviews done as part of their “Humans of the House” podcast, wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail about needing to change the culture within the House of Commons in order to make MPs feel happier and more “psychologically safe” in order to become more productive, and for democracy to be more responsive and representative. Former minister Catherine McKenna tweeted her support for these suggestions, imploring the need for “proper HR practices.” The underlying problem, however, is that Parliament is not a normal workplace, and there cannot be an HR for MPs or Senators because there is no hierarchy of power for them to appeal to. Trying to describe and envision Parliament as a “workplace” in a corporate sense both misses the point, and can undermine the fundamental understanding of our most important institutions.

The first and most fundamental thing to remember is that MPs and Senators are all constitutionally equal in their chambers. Because all MPs are elected, regardless of whether they are a minister or backbencher, they have the same powers, rights and privileges. Similarly in the Senate under their appointments (though the small handful of senators who claimed to be “elected” did try to use that as a bully pulpit with their peers). There is no boss or higher authority for whom MPs can appeal to because they are all the boss. When it comes to what they perceive to be intimidation or harassment, Parliament always had an informal resolution system for complaints between members until fairly recently for that very reason—you are all equal in terms of power, so coming to a resolution together, often with the assistance of party whips or House leaders, was the best way to settle things. This is also why the more formal process that they did end up putting into place is somewhat vague, because again, there is no higher authority to appeal to.

I also have to urge caution about how much value gets assigned to complaints about behaviour in Question Period, because Question Period is not real life. It’s theatre, and MPs act out during it, whether we like it or not. I don’t deny that the heckling isn’t great—but these days it’s far tamer than it used to be. The noise in the Chamber is an order of magnitude quieter than it was a decade ago. And frankly, I have a bit of a hard time sympathizing with MPs who aren’t able to treat theatre as theatre, particularly because they know better when it comes to how things operate the rest of the day outside of those 45 minutes. MPs may not like it when they get knocked off of their messaging by the heckling, but that is also part of the value in it—frankly, I think it’s far more insulting to voters when MPs read prepared scripts to one another, and if you get flustered or upset while doing it, that’s a reflection on your abilities to be a good public speaker. Maybe I’m particularly harsh about this, or being too much of a parliamentary purist, but the excessive message control we see is suffocating democracy, and MPs dutifully reading their scripts is a big part of that problem.

McKenna also keeps bringing up the late-night votes that she and others had to suffer through when it comes to her demand for “proper HR practices,” but again, there is a problem where she points out that the votes were held that way to “make a point”…which is the point. Opposition parties have very few tools at their disposal to resist a government that has a majority of seats in the Commons, and every now and again, they need to use extraordinary means to make a point that simply being voted down can’t make. Can this be a real problem? Sometimes. Were some of the instances of using these tools overkill, or done because they are all tactics and no strategy? Sometimes! But we need to be very careful of stripping the opposition of what few means they have of expressing this kind of displeasure. Again, being an MP is not a nine-to-five corporate office job. MPs shouldn’t expect that it’s what they’re signing up for, and there needs to be a greater respect for the fact that sometimes, making a point is going to mean making life uncomfortable.

I should also point out that Samara’s insistence that hybrid sittings is better for MPs is again predicated on the false notion that this is some kind of office job. It’s not. The job is face-to-face, in Ottawa, and not in the constituency. It also doesn’t actually help MPs with work-life balance—it creates an unrealistic standard of presenteeism that pressures them to always be on Zoom and to always be voting, even if they’re gravely ill, when they should instead be allowed to take leaves of absence, and to have their votes paired off so that this kind of pressure is taken off. I would also note that the constant praise for hybrid sittings is dismissive of the human cost, given the toll it takes on interpreters, which is a brewing crisis in our Parliament that nobody is prepared for.

One of the things I do agree with in the Samara op-ed is the need for better onboarding and training of incoming MPs (and senators), because what they are getting right now, primarily from the Library of Parliament, is clearly insufficient, and we don’t know what kind of internal onboarding that parties give their own members, though it appears to be similarly insufficient, judging from Samara’s research. (This is also the case in the Senate, where the new “independent” model has failed to properly onboard a lot of new senators, which is a problem Trudeau didn’t care about when he unilaterally made this change). This being said, I don’t think the solution is necessarily to use the NDP’s model of creating management and a quasi-union for MPs hiring staff, because that centralizes too much power in the leader’s office, and we saw that abused in the Mulcair era with the illegal “satellite offices” scheme.

Fundamentally, we need to remember that for MPs, the incentives are there to be performative and boorish, which is why this behavior persists. They get media play, and the engagement they get from it justifies their doing it, but it’s also only a fraction of what actually happens—most of their day is very, very quiet and boring. While I do think we need to have conversations about what MPs can do around making their jobs better, it can’t be done from a framework that they are somehow middle managers in a corporate structure. They’re elected officials, and that means something.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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When the toll of the pandemic on Canada’s parliamentary institutions is finally tallied, it will be hard to argue that some of its most devastating impacts have been on the Senate and the job that is has been neglecting to fulfil. For two years now, far too many bills have been rammed through both Houses in a fashion that is too quick and lacks scrutiny or study, settling for a couple of well-meaning speeches and then sending them on their way. It’s not how our Parliament is supposed to work, pandemic or no pandemic, and yet we’ve been allowing it to happen with increasing frequency. Political expediency rules the day, and the role of sober second thought is being eroded with each bill that passes where no committee study happens.

There once was a time where the Senate’s committees were the heart of what it did. Debates in the chamber itself were short and perfunctory in order to ensure that the bill got to committee as expeditiously as possible, so that the real work could begin. It’s one of the reasons why the Senate’s Order Paper and their sitting schedule is built vastly differently from that of the House of Commons—because it recognized that its value lay elsewhere. With the advent of the new “independent” era, this has started slipping away as more and more time gets spent on second reading debate, and since the pandemic and the advent of “hybrid” sittings to maintain some semblance of parliamentary oversight, committees have almost entirely fallen to the wayside, which is an incalculable loss for our institutions.

In the past three weeks, two pieces of government legislation saw almost no debate, and no committee study at all—Bill C-4, which was the ban on conversion therapy; and Bill S-2, which aimed to make changes to the Parliament of Canada Act with respect to making changes to how the Senate operates to codify some of the changes since the rise of the independents (and to give some new allowances along the way). This should never have happened, and it’s a complete abdication of the Senate’s responsibilities, not to mention the responsibilities of the Opposition, whose own motions sped these bills along in spite of their constitutional duties to scrutinize and hold government to account through the process.

With Bill C-4, there are live constitutional issues that should have received a full airing in both Chambers, namely the scope and breadth of the legislation. When the bill was first introduced in the previous parliament, justice minister David Lametti said that the bill had a loophole for “consenting adults” because that was the limit of how far they could go constitutionally—a complete ban would be face challenges that they were apparently not confident they could win. When it was re-introduced at C-4 in this parliament, however, that loophole was removed. When asked, Lametti said it was because they better understood the harms of this practice and that was why it needed a full ban, but because the Conservatives moved the motion to pass the bill in one fell swoop in the Commons, that never got explored in committee as it should have.

The Senate should have done that work, especially because MPs did not. These are live constitutional issues that got zero exploration from expert witnesses, and there is almost nothing on the record for judges to look to when it comes to future court challenges to this legislation. The Senate was where this should have received a full airing, and in a way that is not about partisan point-scoring at committee (unlike in Commons committees), and yet they did not. Why? Because the Opposition in the Senate claimed that they didn’t want the government to use this issue as a political wedge, thus abdicating their constitutional duties and responsibilities.

As for Bill S-2, these are big and important changes to the fundamental operations of the Senate, which have the potential to devalue the role of the Opposition in the Senate, and yet this never saw any committee study, either in the previous parliament when it was Bill S-4, or in this iteration. There were a handful of speeches, most of them in favour of the changes because there are enough senators who have a self-interest in doing so, but there was no study. And because there was no study, nobody apparently flagged that the bill was problematic because it was ostensibly a money bill being initiated in the Senate, which goes against the constitution, and the tricksy language used to get around that might not fly. Well, when this bill sailed through—once again because the Conservatives, who are opposed to the bill, didn’t want to “bog down” the Chamber—the Commons Speaker raised objections about its admissibility, and lo, the government had to withdraw it and re-introduce the Bill in the House of Commons instead.

There are a couple of problems at work here. One of them is the problem of second reading debate, where too many of the newer, independent senators feel compelled to make unnecessary speeches at second reading when the practice had been to simply have the sponsor introduce it, the opposition critic raise objections a few days later, once they considered the sponsor’s speech, and then send it off to committee. Now second reading debate is interminable, much like the House of Commons, and the Senate is slowly turning into what it shouldn’t—some kind of debating society (and the push to organize speeches for the sake of television will only make this worse).

The other, more serious problem, is that hybrid sittings have effectively destroyed the committees because they need to share IT resources and interpreters with the House of Commons, and the Commons gets priority on those resources. This left senators too afraid to use those resources for most committee work (coupled with the unwillingness to simply bubble in Ottawa where they could operate more freely in a protected environment), and hence very little committee study happened, to the detriment of Parliament as a whole.

These are very worrying changes for the Senate, and I fear that this will start setting patterns and precedents, especially among the newer senators, as we have too few of the old guard willing to ensure that procedure is being followed and ensuring that the Senate is fulfilling its role of sober second thought. Sober second thought is not just reading a couple of additional speeches into the record. It was the work in committee that did the serious work the Commons never could do, and that is now in danger of extinction.

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It was inevitable that hybrid sessions would be returning to the House of Commons after the Liberals and NDP both decided that they were necessary, but in trying to justify the decision, there was a combination of telling on themselves, as well as creating a new and impossible standard that they will one day come to regret. On top of that, they are continuing to set a precedent for ways in which ministers can avoid accountability both from the Commons itself as well as the media, which makes this government’s promises about openness and transparency even more hollow than they already were.

For starters, part of MPs telling on themselves is the fact that this decision is decisive proof that they do not care about the health and safety of the interpretation staff. MPs have been told repeatedly that seventy percent of interpreters have suffered either acoustic or cognitive injuries as a result of the hybrid sittings, and that they are being asked to put their health and safety on the line so that MPs can stay home. They have also been told that the finite number of freelancer interpreters in the country, who have been filling in for those interpreters who are unable to work, have not been afforded the same sick benefits that the full-time interpreters have been, meaning that they are even more at risk because they can’t take the time off when they suffer the same injuries. And MPs have proven that they do not care, and that these interpreters are essentially furniture to them.

The other way that MPs told on themselves was in some of the ways they tried to justify this move as being more than just for the pandemic. NDP MP Laurel Collins took her infant into the Chamber with her, and held her during her speech so that she could demonstrate why she needs hybrid sittings for instances where she can’t travel because of her daughter. Numerous other MPs, past and present, lined up over social media to praise Collins and to insist that this was about work-life balance for young parents – no matter that MPs already can design whatever accommodations they see fit to help them, unlike any other workplace in the country (which is fair, because Parliament is not like any other workplace) – but it proves that this is not about the pandemic. Liberals were trying to institute these hybrid sittings ever since 2015, and were being rebuffed by other parties, and they didn’t let the pandemic go to waste in proving the need for this change. They mean for these changes to be permanent, and that is deleterious to the health of our Parliament going forward.

But aside from this particular bout of telegraphing motives, the overt framing that the Liberals used was to try to kick at the Conservatives for the unknown number of MPs in their caucus who allegedly have “vaccine exemptions” of dubious merit given how statistically improbably any more than one exemption would be, and the fact that at least one MP who has claimed such an exemption – Dean Allison – has also been touting the benefits of ivermectin and has invited any “scientists” who want to dispute the merits of vaccination onto his local call-in show. The most irritating part of this, however, is that the Liberals kept trying to frame this as MPs feeling “unsafe” in the House of Commons as a result. They seem to have picked up this particular rhetorical device from certain segments of the online population who use the term of feeling “unsafe” in order to shut down any content they disagree with, and clearly that was what they were hoping to achieve.

Most concerning out of all of this was the fact that MPs have now set up an impossible standard of perfect attendance that never existed before, and which should not exist. There has been so much hyperbolic rhetoric about MPs not being able to raise the concerns of their constituents in debate or in being able to vote that they have literally just made their lives hell. Yes, representation matters, but there are other avenues than simply name-checking one’s riding during a prepared twenty-minute speech based on directions given to them by the House Leader’s office. Often that input is more seen and felt in the caucus room, which is behind closed doors but sometimes that’s where important work gets done without the need for public performance around it. There are more substantive ways to represent concerns than in giving speeches, which is why the concern is so overblown.

By creating this impossible standard around attendance, MPs have just ensured that their jobs, which are already essentially 24/7, even more demanding so that they can no longer take sick days or a leave of absence if it becomes necessary, as the expectation has been set that they must either attend virtually, or vote remotely. This is neither healthy nor responsible, and it also screws future parliaments because there are sometimes tactical absences necessary to prevent the government from falling on confidence votes when there is a much narrower divide in seats in a hung parliament, where one or two votes can make that difference. Those tactical absences are going to become impossible with this standard set, which could make for far more uncomfortable situations down the road.

This is just one more example of how fetishizing technology intended to solve certain problems only winds up creating other, more serious problems down the road. It’s not like they weren’t warned, or that some of the more forward-looking MPs could see this coming. It’s not like there aren’t voices who are telling them that this will only lead to MPs becoming further siloed, where they won’t be able to interact outside of the Chamber and see each other as human beings, who know that this will only further suffocate collegiality and decorum. MPs will come to regret this move before too long, but by then it will be too late, and all for the sake of trying to score points against the Conservatives.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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