Roundup: Pandora’s Box is open

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With the agreement of all House Leaders in the Commons, MPs have finally done it and wrenched open the lid of Pandora’s Box (which is actually a jar) and have let loose evil into the world. That evil is their remote voting app, and Parliament will forever suffer for it.

Am I being a drama queen about this? Hardly. Because we’re already seeing the demands to make these hybrid sittings permanent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked to report on “savings” of this set-up, and in spite of the increased IT and staff costs (and almost no mention of the human costs of the interpreters burning out and suffering cognitive injuries at a horrific rate), he figured that it would save about $6.2 million a year, mostly in travel costs, as well as some 2,972 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. And the senator who commissioned the PBO report was so enthralled with the result that she wants to make hybrid sittings permanent, with the “bonus” that parliamentarians can spend more time in their “ridings” (erm, except senators don’t have ridings because they represent the whole province, Quebec’s senatorial districts notwithstanding).

What I have been warning about this whole time is that MPs would use the pandemic to normalise hybrid sittings and remote voting, because some of them – the Liberals especially – have been pushing for this for years with little success, and with the pandemic, they are not letting a good crisis go to waste. They know that once it’s over, they will contrive excuses to keep these “temporary” measures permanent, starting with the excuse that it’ll be beneficial for MPs on parental leave, and then it’ll be for those with work-life balance issues, and finally it will because they just have so many things going on in their ridings that they couldn’t possibly be in Ottawa – and now they have the added justification of cost savings and reduced GHG from flights. Parliament is facing de-population, and it will become like a homeroom that everyone attends once or twice a year, and that’s it.

The problem is that Parliament is a face-to-face institution. Some of the most important work that happens is actually on the margins of committee rooms, in the lobbies behind the Chambers, or in the corridors. Ministers can be button-holed by MPs in the Chamber waiting for votes, which is incredibly valuable. Relationships are built with stakeholders and witnesses who appear at committee, and that happens face-to-face. And more importantly, MPs need to actually be in the same room for collegiality to happen. When MPs stopped having dinner together in the Parliamentary Restaurant three nights a week after they ended evening sittings, collegiality plummeted and has never recovered. If MPs aren’t even in Ottawa with one another, they will be fully ensconced in partisan bubbles that make it easy to treat one another as the enemy rather than as fellow MPs who can play outraged in the Chamber and go for a drink together afterward (which is becoming rare enough as it is). This is antithetical to what Parliament is. And not enough of them are getting it, so they’re allowing this to go ahead full-steam ahead, and boasting about “modernisation,” and so on. It will kill Parliament, and not enough people will actually care, which is the worst part.

Good reads:

  • Hours after Admiral Art McDonald said he was taking bold action on sexual misconduct, he stepped aside for an investigation into allegations dating to 2010.
  • Here is a look at the lessons we can draw from Israel’s vaccination campaign.
  • The government has tabled a bill to make some of the pandemic work-arounds for courts more permanent, such as video selection of juries.
  • The Quebec court granted the government yet another month extension to pass the assisted dying bill as the Conservatives keep stalling debate on amendments.
  • Bill Blair says that the Chinese-owned contractor for visa offices in India was selected by the Conservatives in 2008 (as they keep asking about it in QP).
  • Blair also gave an explicit warning that Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and even TikTok could be used for hostile purposes by state actors.
  • RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki admits that they should do more to help people who are being threatened and harassed by Chinese agents.
  • The Auditor General released reports into shipbuilding, First Nations drinking water, IT procurement, the Canada Child Benefit, and rail safety.
  • The Bank of Canada is making a diversity push after a decline in women staff members.
  • Fighter jet companies are hoping to sell their designs to the government in part by touting their industrial benefits as post-COVID stimulus.
  • There are calls to change election laws to outlaw the Nationalist Party, whose leader has been charged with anti-Semitic hate crimes, but the government says no.
  • After reports of a sexual assault at a quarantine hotel, the Conservatives are demanding that the programme be scrapped.
  • Jagmeet Singh says the he will categorically rule out any kind of governing arrangement with the Conservatives post-election (whenever that is).
  • Also, Singh’s favourite bike was stolen from his Ottawa condo.
  • Matt Gurney says it’s time to just swallow the cost and build the ships, the planes, and submarines that our country so desperately needs.
  • Susan Delacourt recounts Jagmeet Singh’s meeting with the Star’s editorial board, and his fixation on the (nonsensical) belief that Trudeau wants a spring election.
  • Robert Hiltz points out that blaming people for lining up at HomeSense is just letting the premiers off the hook for loosening those restrictions in the first place.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1365062608882171916

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One thought on “Roundup: Pandora’s Box is open”

  1. “Parliament is facing de-population, and it will become like a homeroom that everyone attends once or twice a year, and that’s it. … It will kill Parliament, and not enough people will actually care, which is the worst part.”

    Quite right, for all the reasons you’ve stated. It will be great for governments who find Members of Parliament an inconvenience at the best of times. Now the optics will be that voting on matters of state is little different that ordering a pizza. And, I predict, this will result in the delivery of more Hawaiian mistakes and pineapple policies. As for MPs themselves, they will settle even more egregiously into the role they have made for themselves as glorified and highly paid constituency social workers.

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