(Ottawa) The federal Liberals want to make virtual participation in the House of Commons a permanent option for MPs. They are committed to making this happen before anyone can go home for the summer.
All parties have agreed to create a hybrid workplace once MPs begin to return to the House of Commons, following the lockdowns of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. App voting began in 2021.
The hybrid system, designed to be temporary, has been in place ever since, even though public health guidelines no longer encourage people to avoid gatherings and work from home where possible.
Government House Leader Mark Holland said this meant MPs could carry on with their work while attending important events in their constituencies or attending to personal and family matters.
He argued that making the hybrid system permanent could help encourage new people to run for public office, such as parents of young children.
Mr. Holland is expected to introduce a motion in the House of Commons today. It will be debated and voted on before June 23, the last sitting day before the summer break.
The ordinance that currently allows a hybrid parliament expires at the end of the month.
Mr Holland said the need to debate the extension of this emergency order at the start of each session of Parliament has taken up a lot of time.
“We had three years to experiment with this, to see how it would work, and now I think it’s time not to question everything every time we start a new session of Parliament,” he said. declared.
The parties have accused each other of abusing the hybrid voting system over the past three years. On Thursday, Mr Holland suggested that Tory MPs were inventing bogus technical glitches to slow down debate on the Liberal budget.
The Conservatives have voted against keeping hybrid options in the past, arguing that MPs should be in their seats during sittings.
The Procedure and House Affairs Committee recently recommended the option of participating remotely by permanent videoconference. NDP and Liberal MPs voted in favor of the recommendation, but the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois opposed it.
In their report to Parliament, the Conservatives said the benefits of hybrid procedures “may not be worth the cost in terms of hiring interpreters, maintaining bilingualism, government accountability, quality decision-making and to political discourse. The Bloc argued that translation problems are a threat to language rights.
There have been more reports of hearing injuries among federal interpreters since parliamentary work shifted to virtual formats, and in February a court ruled the government violated the Labor Code by failing to protect interpreters from workplace injuries.
New rules have been created to standardize the type of headsets and microphones used by committee witnesses and MPs when participating remotely.
Mr Holland acknowledged there were also problems with virtual interpretation, both in the House of Commons and in committees, but said the government was working on solutions.
“I want to be absolutely clear: we will not leave Parliament until we have adopted the hybrid,” he warned.