Roundup: An end to hybrid sittings?

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Now that the Commons has risen for the summer, the parties are starting to evaluate the hell that is hybrid sittings, and lo, they are largely in favour of returning to regular, in-person sittings once again. Praise the gods on Olympus! They recognise that it’s harder to hold government to account when you can’t see the minister in front of you, and that you can’t build comradery with your fellow MPs, and that there is a sense of futility debating video screens. (And in an interview a week ago, outgoing MP Wayne Easter also noted that it’s harder for MPs within a caucus to form groups to push back against the leadership if they can’t be in the room together).

I’m going to temper that praise a little bit, because they’re already talking about exceptions, whether it’s for MPs with illnesses, or those with small children, and this is where it starts. When they return in the fall, or in the next parliament, whichever comes first, you can bet that the Liberals in particular are going to keep pushing for a number of exceptions so that the hybrid format never really goes away, and therein lies the danger – that the longer it’s able to carry on, future cohorts become more used to these sittings than the ones who are used to in-person sittings, the easier it will be for future populists to start abusing the system to stay out of Ottawa as a point of pride. It won’t happen overnight, but once you open the door a little bit, it will get used and abused.

There was one area where I could be persuaded, which was around committee meetings during weeks when the Chamber isn’t sitting – particularly emergency meetings. Often times, those involve flying into Ottawa for a single hour-long meeting, then flying home, which is a huge waste of time and resources (not to mention the carbon footprint). So I could be persuaded – but the flipside of that is that it removes an element of deterrence for not calling these emergency meetings, which are often done for the sake of a political performance. It’s something to consider in the longer term, but again, now that Pandora’s box is opened and the evil is out in the world, we should try to limit the damage as much as possible.

Good reads:

  • Chrystia Freeland is hopeful that some pandemic supports won’t need to be extended past the current September 25th deadline.
  • Northern Affairs minister Dan Vandal says that surviving perpetrators of abuses in residential schools should be charged, but there are currently no plans to do so.
  • Here is an interview with Marc Miller about where we are with truth and reconciliation after the discoveries of those unmarked grave sites.
  • The government overhauled the programme to offer financial assistance to parents whose children were victims of serious crimes, but there is still little uptake.
  • The RCMP is looking at ways to remove serial harassers from its ranks, and prevent others from retiring early to escape discipline.
  • Here is a longread about the career of Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella.
  • Infrastructure minister Catherine McKenna is expected to announce her that she won’t run again in the next election today.
  • Chantal Hébert suggests that Trudeau start plugging some weak links in his Cabinet, starting with Harjit Sajjan (and lo, he has an opportunity with McKenna bowing out).

Odds and ends:

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4 thoughts on “Roundup: An end to hybrid sittings?”

  1. Not that I’d expect you to know this all overnight, but you usually provide some behind-the-scenes insightful and knowledge from within the benches about stuff going beyond just pure speculation and educated guesswork and I kind of hoping for some of it as to why Catherine McKenna won’t be staying in the House?

  2. Zoom Parliament or no Zoom Parliament, how can *anyone* build camaraderie with a party chock-full of homophobes, science denialists and other reality-averse extremists? The Cons seem to be in a cult of their own making, by their own choice to harbor and promote regressive and hateful platforms just to “own the Libs.” Makes me wonder how do visible-minority or LGBT Cons reconcile “camaraderie” within their own “big blue tent,” when their colleagues are fomenting anger among voters who don’t even believe they should exist.

    Then again, on the other side of the horseshoe, the NDP are quite content to libel Liberals as “Cons with red ties” because they haven’t overhauled the constitution to fulfill luxury space communism overnight. Maybe the MPs are able to strike common ground on other things but it sure looks to me like it matters not what format Parliament is sitting, because the high school kids go off to their own cliques anyway.

  3. Iain Stewart was a MP according to Wikipedia?
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Parliament#Canada

  4. You mention the issue of emergency meetings to allow for Zoom participation on calls, but could it also be applied to individual MPs who are physically unable to make it to Ottawa (due to illness, family emergency, stranded due to bad weather, etc.) but still want to be able to participate?

    This would be on a strictly individual basis, and each case would be decided individually-if the conditions don’t exist, then the MP has to physically come to Ottawa. The details would need to be worked out, of course, but it would still allow for sudden problems MPs might run into while still maintaining the principle of physically being in Ottawa as much as possible.

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