OTTAWA -- Members of Parliament adjourned their fall session on Friday, wrapping up what has been a 2020 House of Commons sitting like no other.
When they return, a show down over the introduction of a voting app system is shaping up, as deliberations continue over extending of the House’s hybrid sitting parameters, which expire at the end of the day.
Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, MPs put in place a special hybrid sitting agreement after the new session kicked off in September following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s prorogation.
The agreement, which allowed MPs to be able to participate in-person or virtually in the Chamber and at committee, to temporarily allow remote roll-call voting, set up the electronic tabling of documents, and provided for physical distancing of MPs within the chamber, expires Dec.11 at midnight.
This deal came after MPs spent months only holding truncated and semi-frequent emergency sittings with some MPs participating virtually through Zoom and others sitting spread out in the Chamber, to pass emergency COVID-19 legislation and to question the government on its pandemic response.
Talks have been ongoing across the aisle to try to come to a consensus on extending the agreement for a few weeks, but as of late Friday afternoon when the House rose, no deal had been reached.
The sticking point appears to be the Liberal’s push to roll out the voting-by-app system that the House of Commons administration has been testing for months.
Government House Leader Pablo Rodriguez told CTVNews.ca in an interview that the app is ready, and has the backing of the Bloc Quebecois and New Democrat MPs.
“This app is needed, is required,” said Rodriguez. He said it would allow for a nearly instantaneous vote count, and as a measure of security the moment the vote is cast the app takes a photo of the person using it and compares it to a photo of the MP on file to ensure that it was the MP who voted.
“It's extremely secure, and if that picture doesn’t fit perfectly, then you can't vote… totally 100 per cent super secure,” Rodriguez said, adding that it’d only be the way voting is done so long as all 338 MPs can’t gather in the House to vote in the traditional way.
The Conservatives say they are “absolutely open” to the app system, but it needs more testing.
“We will not accept anything before testing and to see how people react… if people, 338 Members of Parliament are satisfied with the system, we’ll go on,” said Conservative House Leader Gerard Deltell in an interview.
In his view, the House is functioning just fine now without the app voting option, despite votes now taking considerably longer than they ever have before.
“Things are going well, the system functions. We have debate, we have laws adopted, we have parliamentary committees working well… We are doing our job, the government is doing its job, so that's perfect. We want it to continue until the end of June,” said Deltell.
On Friday, Deltell unsuccessfully moved a unanimous consent motion proposing to extend the hybrid agreement until Wednesday, June 23, 2021 and to tweak the terms around how House of Commons committees would be able to convene over the holidays, without adding in the voting-by-app option.
This means that from now until MPs reconvene on Jan. 25, 2021, there’s no set logistical plan in place to allow for pandemic-cautious sitting measures.
Should MPs be able to stay away from Ottawa for a month, this shouldn’t be an issue; however, the unpredictable nature of the COVID-19 crisis could prompt an emergency sitting over the weeks between now and late January.
As well, the Senate is still sitting, considering the government’s contentious legislative updates to Canada’s medical assistance in dying regime, after the Conservatives filibustered debate in the House over several days.
Should Senators pass amendments to that bill, MPs could be recalled to consider the changes sent back to them by the upper chamber. Though, staring down a Dec. 18 court-imposed deadline to pass the bill, the federal government has requested an extension to update the law by late February, which could avoid a Christmas recall of MPs.
If the House did need to come back, an interim agreement to keep up the pandemic precautions in place would be needed, otherwise the normal Commons procedures would apply.
“There's two possibilities: We negotiate something on a hybrid model and we come back, or the whips negotiate for a specific number of MPs to be in the house,” Rodriguez said.
The more than month-long legislative hiatus means that several key bills that have not passed—including the bill to implement new measures promised in the fall economic update and the bill to implement the new Canada-U.K. trade agreement— will have to wait until the new year to keep moving through Parliament.
Rodriguez said that over the next month, the House administration will be using the time to run some needed updates to the current digital systems within the House of Commons after the hybrid model came together rather quickly earlier this year.
He said that while the last few months have not been easy, “everybody deserves a break from all parties, and the staff.”
