For his Tuesday presser, prime minister Justin Trudeau noted the reports of his mother being sent to hospital when her apartment building in Montreal caught fire, and assured everyone that he had spoken to her and that she is doing fine. There wasn’t much in the way of news to share – noting that new federal modelling numbers for the course of the pandemic would be released shortly (and they were, with the same obligatory dumb questions as though these were predictions and not tools for planning purposes), and that their federal guidelines would also be forthcoming later in the day (and they too were). The Q&A was mostly focused on attempts to get Trudeau to say whether or not he would make any potential COVID-19 vaccine mandatory, some obligatory Francophone outrage that some of the personal protective equipment coming into the country didn’t have French labelling, and several attempts for him to give his personal opinion on whether he would send his kids to school if they were reopened when Quebec’s intend to be (which he dodged repeatedly, talking about science and evidence).

And then came the Great Virtual Committee Meeting – which was not a sitting of the House of Commons as so many people kept calling it. I settled on Committee Zoom™ as what I was going to call it, for what it’s worth. It started off with a ministerial statement from Patty Hajdu, followed by each other party offering a response of equal length, none of which had any bearing on what she was talking about, because we don’t actually debate in this country any longer – we just read prepared speeches past one another. After a brief interruption for petitions, we got down to the questions – five-minute rounds started with Scheer (who was the only leader to ask questions; Jagmeet Singh was wholly absent from the entire day), and then distributed through the parties in what appeared to be the QP rotation list that included obsequious backbench suck-up questions from the Liberals. But it was glitchy – lots of mute button errors, interruptions when MPs didn’t mute properly, constant challenges with the translation channels and which channel the MP was speaking on (some of those points of order leading to huge digressions as points mounted), a couple of Ministers whose connections were poor and made for very bad sound (spare a thought for the poor transcriptionists in Hansard),

Our first virtual meeting of the House of Commons: some minor technical challenges, but overall the format has led to more thoughtful questions and answers than most QPs I've seen.

— Nate Erskine-Smith (@beynate) April 28, 2020

Of course, everyone’s takeaway seems to be just how civil the whole thing was, and that there was no heckling. The closest we got was when Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner was fairly aggressively asking questions and interrupting the responses she felt were taking too long. But without the clapping (which needs to die regardless) and the heckling, everyone has taken up with the impression that this was somehow preferable to QP. It’s not. Sure, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith has a point about the questions being generally better, but this was also the function of it not being on a 35-second clock, which QP needs to do away with as it is. That would help matters immensely. But the flip-side of this format is that ministers were able to give non-sequitur talking point answers that had nothing to do with what was asked of them (particularly the ones around tax havens), which is one of the places where heckling in the Chamber would actually help get that point across. Heckling doesn’t need to be just the jeering, hooting baboons that it can be (and yes, it absolutely can be). As well, there is a need for some theatre in politics, and I don’t see the long-term benefit of being robbed of it by trying to make this a more permanent feature as people are already salivating at the prospect of. The unintended consequences will be far worse than you can possibly imagine.

Good reads:

• In the second part of her interview, Dr. Theresa Tam talks more about what the “new normal” when we emerge from the lockdown may look like.
• While the Commons Special Committee was using a “secured” version of Zoom (and Cabinet is not), here’s a look at some of the concerns around that platform.
• The loss of restaurant demand means that potatoes have piled up in warehouses instead of being processed into French fries.
• Here’s a look at how the pandemic is flooding courts with requests for custody changes because of infection fears.
• Charities continue to struggle through the pandemic, even though the government has been rolling out new funds for them.
• Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner has been living and working in Oklahoma during the pandemic, where her husband and stepchildren hail from.
• Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column wonders about the rules around secrecy of draft bills, particularly in these particular times of truncated legislative processes.
• Economist Trevor Tombe looks at the fiscal reckoning that Alberta faces with its triple crises hitting it at once.
• Heather Scoffield listens to the voices calling for greater government intervention in the economy (think “industrial strategies”) once we’re out of the pandemic.
• Matt Gurney boggles at how completely hapless Andrew Scheer has been these past few weeks and calls for his immediate ouster.
• Colby Cosh takes a closer look at the Apple Maps “walking” data metrics, particularly as they show big uptakes in places like Edmonton.
• My column delves into why it’s a good thing that the procedural fudge of these virtual committee meetings aren’t actual sittings of the Commons.

Hey tweeps! Want to read #UnbrokenMachine while you’re social distancing? Here’s your chance to get it at 25% off. https://t.co/PpC4ovVe7S

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) March 23, 2020

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