Roundup: A hospitalized interpreter should be a wake-up call, but probably won’t be

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The inevitable has happened, and a parliamentary interpreter collapsed during a Senate committee meeting after an acoustic shock and was sent to hospital as a result, when the committee chair decided to go ahead with a meeting despite the fact that two witnesses appearing by video did not have appropriate headsets. And to add to matters, this interpreter was a freelancer and not in the union, so they won’t be getting sick pay for this injury either, given that they were filling in for the full-time, unionised interpreters who are on leave for the injuries they are all facing because of hybrid sessions and meetings, and the fact that the vast majority of MPs and senators simply do not care about their well-being, or the fact that these kinds of acoustic injuries can lead to permanent hearing loss. They don’t care because it would mean giving up the luxury of staying in their ridings rather than coming to Ottawa when they don’t want to, even if it means treating the interpretation staff like furniture. (And as we’ve established, they cannot simply hire more interpreters because there aren’t any more to hire—they’re not even graduating enough to meet the level of attrition from retirements and those quitting from injuries).

To add to this was Government House Leader Mark Holland appearing at the Procedure and House Affairs Committee, where they are debating extending hybrid sittings, possibly permanently, and he spoke about his suicide attempt after his 2011 election loss and used that tale as justification for extending hybrid. And as brave as Holland is to share that story, I find myself deeply disturbed by the fact that he is using it to push for a morally bankrupt proposition around making hybrid sittings permanent when he knows the human cost to them. I am also appalled that the lesson is trying to be “when an MP is struggling, let them work from home” rather than “when an MP is struggling, let them take the time they need to get better and not create an unrealistic and dangerous expectation of presenteeism.” MPs are allowed sick days and leaves of absence. They do not need to be on call 24/7, or to vote on every single issue. There were rules about pairing for absences for decades, and they worked just fine. It’s the same with the groups who keep appearing at PROC, such as Equal Voice, who insist that we need to make hybrid permanent to let more women with children participate in Parliament—it ignores the human toll on the interpreters (and when you raise it, they simply handwave it away with the magic words “we need to find a solution”), and frankly these MPs have the luxury of options when it comes to arrangements they can make. Hybrid or virtual sittings injures interpreters. If there is a technological solution, Parliament has been ignoring it. It is frankly morally reprehensible that they continue to have this debate at the expense of the health of these interpreters. It would be great if this publicised injury and hospitalisation were a wake-up call, but I am frankly too cynical at this point to believe that is going to happen.

Ukraine Dispatch, Day 244:

Russia continues to claim that Ukraine is planning to use a “dirty bomb,” which sounds increasingly like pretext for Russia to detonate one, and that they have been using their occupation of the Zaphorizhzhia nuclear plant to build it.

Good reads:

  • Chrystia Freeland emphasised the independence of the Bank of Canada as Jagmeet Singh has joined in the chorus criticising it as another rate hike happens.
  • François-Philippe Champagne rejected the original Rogers-Shaw deal, and set out conditions if Shaw still wants to transfer its Freedom Mobile to Videotron.
  • Marco Mendicino says the email from Brenda Lucki saying police hadn’t exhausted all tools doesn’t mean that invoking the Emergencies Act wasn’t necessary.
  • Jonathan Wilkinson says the federal government is still pursuing the Atlantic Loop energy corridor project after Nova Scotia Power has “paused” its participation.
  • The military ombudsman is calling out the fact that his recommendations around the treatment of injured reservists and Canadian Rangers haven’t been addressed.
  • The Canada Infrastructure Bank is putting nearly $1 billion into building a small modular reactor at the site of the Darlington nuclear plant.
  • The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal declined to approve the $40 billion settlement agreement for First Nations children taken into care.
  • It appears that two Canadian women who joined ISIS and their children are returning to Canada from the detention camp in Syria.
  • At the Emergencies Act inquiry, more top police say the chance to reduce the size of the occupation was lost when the Ottawa police chief refused any concessions.
  • OPP intelligence also says that unnamed foreign adversaries may have leveraged the occupation “movement” to advance their own interests.
  • MPs on the public safety committee voted unanimously to hear from OPP officers why they changed their story on the threats posed by the occupation in Ottawa.
  • Yves-François Blanchet says his oath to the Crown was insincere, which could mean a process will be forced to get underway to remove him from his seat.
  • Doug Ford and Sylvia Jones did not show up in Question Period in Queen’s Park to answer why they are fighting the summons to the Emergencies Act inquiry.
  • Susan Delacourt marks the 30th anniversary of the defeat of the Charlottetown Accords, and the period of constitutional aversion that followed.
  • Paul Wells susses out some threads of police testimony at the public inquiry, especially around the presence of Navigator during policing decision-making.
  • My column looks at Jagmeet Singh’s latest list of demands, and why they are heavy on complex policies that require provincial cooperation that can’t happen overnight.

Odds and ends:

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