THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON RULES, PROCEDURES AND THE RIGHTS OF PARLIAMENT
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Tuesday, October 24, 2023
The Standing Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament met this day at 9:32 a.m. [ET], to consider possible amendments to the Rules, pursuant to rule 12-7(2)(a).
Senator Diane Bellemare (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Welcome, everyone, to the Standing Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament. My name is Diane Bellemare. I am a Senator from Quebec, and I’m chair of the Committee. Today, we will continue our study of committee structure and mandates. Before introducing our guest, we will introduce the senators who are here. I’ll start on the right.
Senator Woo: Hello, I am Yuen Pau Woo, from British Columbia.
Senator Mégie: Marie-Françoise Mégie from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Cordy: Jane Cordy from Nova Scotia.
Senator Busson: Bev Busson from British Columbia.
Senator Greene: Steve Greene from Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
Senator Ringuette: Pierrette Ringuette from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Omidvar: Ratna Omidvar, Ontario.
Senator Black: Rob Black, Ontario.
Senator Wells: David Wells, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator MacDonald: Michael MacDonald, Nova Scotia.
[Translation]
The Chair: Thank you, everyone, for being here.
We have with us today the Honourable Pamela Wallin, Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy. She is going to share her thoughts on mandates and structures, and on the questions about our study that we sent to her.
We will then open the floor to questions. We’ll allot four to five minutes per person for questions; and please keep the introductory remarks brief, as usual. The floor is yours, senator.
[English]
Hon. Pamela Wallin: Thank you, chair. I do not have a prepared opening statement. I felt that the Q and A part would be better. However, I will make a few comments as you are taking a look at the structure of committees and how they may have changed in the morphing Senate atmosphere we are now in.
I have a couple of thoughts as we discuss this. Timing is always an important issue — committees having access to enough time to do their work. We have real problems with this in terms of the number of hours available to us in a given week, and with all the growing constraints on travel that we have seen, it becomes harder to switch the Thursdays and the Fridays and still maintain time. I think it is an issue that we do have to grapple with. Some of my thoughts about it then raise the question of whether our committees are perhaps too large and whether they could be whittled down in size. The actual time involved in going around the table and giving everybody an opportunity to speak takes up the majority of the committee, and there’s not much time for actual deeper dives because of the size of the committees.
If we did have smaller committees, we might be able to have smaller allocations of time where we have one committee meeting a week that’s two hours and one that’s an hour, or maybe three meetings that are one hour each. We could try and deal with some issues that way to get around it.
I do think we have to fundamentally change this. The issues we are dealing with are very complicated these days. I also think we need to be more time sensitive and more relevant to the issues of the day, so we do need a little bit more flexibility.
That said, I think it is also time to balance that with a reminder and a discussion — we always have this discussion when new senators come in — about what the briefing process is. How do we talk to people about what the Senate really is and how do we remind everybody — and ourselves who have been here for a longer time — what the actual purpose is? We are a second house of Parliament. There are two. We’re not less important, and we’re not more important, but we are a house of Parliament, and we are the chamber of sober second thought. It is our job to impose a second, third and fourth pair of eyes on legislation that the government of the day puts toward.
We know what happens in reality on the House of Commons side. It’s a very political process. It’s their job. They want to get elected or they want to defeat the government that’s there, so sometimes the legislation they put forward is impacted by that. It’s ever more important these days that we impose that sober second thought.
The other purpose of the Senate that is as important if not more important — and we’ve heard this for many years — is that we are the country’s most powerful and persuasive think tank. That is a role we must take seriously. People have long cited the examples of, for example, Michael Kirby’s work on mental illness. It was not a dominant political issue of the day or a piece of legislation, but it was an issue that underlay so many other discussions that it needed to be looked at. Sometimes we need to take those kinds of big issues and really wrestle them because there isn’t time in an elected chamber to really do that. That is the other benefit we have.
We have outside forces changing the nature of the Senate as well as some internal forces. I think we have to deal with both. The impact of television cameras, as we know and have witnessed in the House of Commons, fundamentally changed how people behave and how they react to one another. I don’t think that has been particularly positive. On the other hand, part of our job is to be educative for the public to understand the issues we are dealing and wrestling with. Therefore, it is important that those cameras are there. However, it has changed our behaviour, and we need to be cognizant of that, and we need to take individual responsibility to minimize our attempts to use or misuse the television cameras.
The impact of omnibus bills has really impacted our work. When we get budget bills that have everything else in them, we have to figure out which committees and how many committees deal with this, and that’s a new and trending force. We have the question of the government taking our amendment process seriously when we propose changes to bills. I noticed this over time, and I bring to this table not only from my years as a journalist covering these things but from my time here in the Senate. When we propose amendments, it’s generally because there is a rationale for that.
I’m just looking at the recent Supreme Court decision on Bill C-69. There were more than 200 amendments put forward on that bill dealing with some of the very specific issues that the court itself dealt with. We need cooperation from our elected partners.
On the internal pressures, again, it comes back to understanding our purpose and our role here. Senators feel an obligation to support those who appointed them, to “dance with the ones that brung them.” That has long been an issue in the Senate, and I think we have to work every day to minimize that.
We need to be constantly focused on being relevant and impactful. Sometimes we have long studies, and that’s terrific, and sometimes they need it. Sometimes we need to respond to issues of the day.
I will leave it at that. I will brag a little bit about Banking when given the opportunity in terms of our response, how the public has responded to our committee reports, how often they are downloaded and accessed and all of those things, but I will do that as we carry on.
Senator Kutcher: Thank you, Senator Wallin, for your perspective not only as a chair of a committee but also from your extensive experience as a member of various different committees.
I have two questions. The first is about fact checking information within committees. Occasionally, there are situations where we hear from witnesses. There may be 12 studies that show X and one study that shows Y, but the witness only discusses Y. Or we may hear hyperbolic type of commentary about data. There doesn’t seem to be a mechanism whereby the committee can actually fact check what the witness has told us, and I think that’s a real problem. We accept witnesses prima facie that what they are telling us is actually reflective of what the evidence says. I’ve seen some senators use the committee chair to ask that the information come back as a fact check, but the Library of Parliament could possibly do that. What do you think of some kind of mechanism that committees could use to actually fact check witness information?
Senator Wallin: This, I will say again, tends to be less of a problem in a committee like Banking, but I have certainly served on committees where that is an issue. It is hard to distinguish between fact and opinion when people use certain facts to present their opinion as if it were evidence. Especially in complicated, emotional issues, issues that touch on very profound personal beliefs, I think that is an issue.
I would like to see our Library of Parliament folks have a lot more leeway, but in order to have the leeway to fact check, they need the resources. I look with great envy at the American system where Senate committees have staff and the committees themselves have abundant staff who can do not only original research but fact checking. Of course, they’ve evolved into the use of video and everything else at this point.
We need to do that. Until there are more resources available, it will be difficult for them to do it, but it is a request we need to make and a decision we have to take on as a body. Right now, we know what happens. We all come to our committees having done our own homework and with the assistance of our staff, and that’s pretty much it in terms of where you can go to pull in the resources you need. I would like to see a lot more of that, so we have the ability.
Senator Kutcher: I have a similar question but slightly different, and that is in the selection of witnesses. We want to make sure that we have a balance. We want to make sure we hear various opinions and perspectives from across the country, but we also want to make sure we have informed opinion — sometimes — and that’s based on best available witnesses. Sometimes, witnesses come who have very strong opinions but their opinions may not be informed by best available evidence. I also notice that we sometimes go back to witnesses who have been in the House or, thematically, we just go back to them.
There are organizations in Canada that have access to independent, relatively unbiased, critically evaluative witnesses as a pool, but we don’t use like them, for example, in health, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences or the Royal Society. I don’t know that we utilize the best expertise in this country because I don’t know that our witness selection is set up to reach out to organizations that would have these kinds of witnesses. What are your thoughts on that?
Senator Wallin: Yes. It is important that we broaden that field. One of the upsides of the COVID experience in the Senate is that we can now use technology to reach out to get a few more witnesses from other places. Not everyone has to travel to Ottawa because that really limited the pool and had set the stage for some of your highlighted concerns. That’s kind of the pool that we keep going back to, but I think we have now opened that up and expanded.
As the house that represents the provinces and as individual senators, it’s our job to make sure we are putting forward the names of experts and reputable people who have been fact checked in other ways. We can put those names forward to increase that list. Again, it puts the workload more on the individual senator’s office, but it’s a way to start adjusting the system and expanding the list from which we all operate so that we are getting a broader, more representative view.
As somebody from Western Canada, I am constantly trying to battle that because it doesn’t matter whether you look at health issues or the economy or the impact of interest rates, it’s different depending on where you live. Those things have to be reflected in our committees. It is partly our job, and it’s partly a request we must make of the system as well, to keep that in mind.
[Translation]
The Chair: I’d like to add that a very interesting point has just been raised that has not often been raised, namely, that of calling on associations to help us diversify our witnesses.
[English]
Senator Wells: Thank you, Senator Wallin, for the good work you do as chair of the Banking Committee.
I want to ask you about prioritizing legislation that’s studied at committee — maybe the Banking Committee but committees in general — among government legislation, private members’ bills, Senate public bills and reports. All of those have their levels of importance, and we know that committees are masters of their own domains. In your answer, could you include some consideration for the ongoing discussions that leadership has about prioritizing bills that may not be introduced before other bills and how that works? With fairness, I think it should be given to all bills that are introduced, whether they are in the House or the Senate. Could you comment on the prioritization of those items?
Senator Wallin: Thank you. I do think this is a big and growing issue. I don’t know if my numbers are completely accurate, but I think we have something like 79 Senate private bills in front of the chamber right now. This is a new and expanding phenomenon. I have one of those bills; it is based on government legislation, an amendment that was put forward, agreed upon by the Senate and rejected by government and so we have come back at it another way.
We have issues, especially with my earlier comments about the restricted time available for committees, the size of committees, the complexity of issues. We must start to reorder and to prioritize our business.
I do think that government legislation has to maintain pride of place in terms of what our job is here. It goes to our core, which is sober second thought. Look at government legislation. That’s our job, but we can’t always do it with a gun to our head. Increasingly, we see that kind of time frame, like budget documents and this has to be done yesterday. It undermines our responsibility as senators to provide sober second thought.
If governments have pressures with their timelines, then we should be getting legislation earlier. Some of that responsibility has to go back on them; do not give it to us on June 29 and say we need it by June 28. It just can’t work that way.
Committees, as you quite rightly said, are masters of their own domain. People come to these committees because of areas of interest and because of expertise. If you sit on the Banking Committee or the Transport and Communications Committee, you bring to the table issues and ideas that are relevant in that area that need study because you know, as someone who is interested in those issues, what is on the table and what is at stake. That’s why we have said committees should be choosing what to study.
We’ve also seen a more recent tendency of people to try and direct committees from the floor of the Senate, saying “I would like the Banking Committee or the Finance Committee to study X,” and I don’t think we can realistically deal with that level of input. People who have particular issues may not sit on the committee. If you are really interested in the issues that each of these committees have as their mandate, then join that committee and make your case with your colleagues about what should be a priority in terms of how the committee studies it.
Separate from the committee structure, I do think the Senate itself will have to deal with the issue of the growing number of private Senate bills because we simply don’t have the capacity to deal with that. When it goes down the list of importance, because we’ve got government bills to deal with and we’ve got the decisions and choices of the committee members themselves, the informed committees, people get upset if their bills aren’t being dealt with instantly. We simply don’t have time. We have a responsibility to do what we said we are going to do. That’s a larger question for leadership in this body and other committees — perhaps even your own — to come to terms with and make some commentary on that.
We have other mechanisms as senators. You can do inquiries. You can do all sorts of other things. Not everything has to be a piece of legislation to be studied this minute because it is really straining our system.
[Translation]
The Chair: Thank you very much for your response and comments. I think that’s a file that we will have to follow because it is also connected with other points in our study.
Senator Mégie: Hello, Senator Wallin. It’s a pleasure to see you as a witness. My first question is brief: How many bilingual senators do you have on your committee?
[English]
Senator Wallin: I would say more than a third, possibly even a half; I don’t know. At least a third.
[Translation]
The Chair: There are at least four.
Senator Mégie: The reason for my question is that you and I had experienced a situation in a committee: The reports were very well written; our translators do fine work. However, the subtleties of the French language forced us to proceed point by point, as you’ll recall.
According to your experience at the Senate, would it be a good idea for committees to also review the French version before giving their approval? That is, before saying that the report is accepted by everyone: the English version for unilingual English speakers and the French version. Often, we look at the English version and say that it’s fine. Can you give us any advice on this?
[English]
Senator Wallin: That is certainly an ongoing issue, as we know from the committee that we sat on. There are subtleties that went missing in that particular report. What I found, even on Banking, is that the French-speaking senators have taken it upon themselves to go through both copies and look for those inconsistencies. Again, that’s a burden we are putting on an individual senator, which I think is unfair; and in a body that is bilingual and must be, again, these become staffing issues and access. We saw this in the course of the pandemic and that we were sort of the B team when it came to resources in the Senate, and we lost staffing on every level because the resources were being used by the House of Commons.
Senator Ringuette and I once looked at this issue in a mini study on the side that we need more and better translation facilities in this body. We count on the agreement of our colleagues to try and cope when we don’t have access to those services.
As a house of Parliament, we really should have the resources we need to operate in both official languages and to make sure the studies are consistent. We do tend to go with the majority language in any committee, in terms of reviewing a report and going through it clause by clause, because we have counted on our colleagues to do the homework in advance and to point that out. I don’t think it’s good enough.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: Is it possible to put my name down for the next round of questions?
The Chair: Yes.
[English]
Senator Batters: Thank you, Senator Wallin. I wanted to go back to the point you briefly raised in your remarks about omnibus bills. Sometimes, as I’m sure you have experienced, there are very important issues that can be kind of hidden in omnibus bills. With the very short time we are given to study matters and the pressure of it being tied to a budget bill that needs to be passed quickly, sometimes it is difficult to find the true extent of some of those issues. Then if you do find something and even figure out a way that it should be amended to fix it, it is sometimes almost impossible to amend those kinds of things, even if it is absolutely needed, because it is tied to a budget bill.
Can you tell us some experiences you may have had with those types of issues, maybe on the Banking Committee or other committees?
Senator Wallin: Yes, we do get those kinds of issues at Banking. We know what happens when a budget bill, or an omnibus bill — often a budget bill — comes is that no one committee can take it on. It is too massive. Finance has so many ongoing issues plus the core, so they divide it up and one committee will get sections 43, 49, 51 and 27, and they may or may not be related to one another. It may end up that it’s not our area of expertise, which means we then would have to bring in other people on copyright law, for example, even though Banking has done a study on that in the past, but the membership has long changed since we did that original study.
This issue goes fundamentally to the ability of the Senate to do its work. It has to be taken on as an issue between the two chambers. I know we have a process for dealing with this when there are amendments put forward that are then rejected by the government and sent back, and we very seldom take it to the last step, which is a joint committee of the two houses to wrestle that and come to some compromise.
In order to preserve our role, the respect that we garner from the public now and our responsibilities to them, it’s most important that we start to use that or other mechanisms to really force the discussion with our counterparts in the other house to say that we need to find a way that works better here.
I don’t know how else to do it. We can have joint parliamentary committees. We sat on one of those on the MAID question, for example. It’s still dominated by members of the House of Commons. I would like to see that process be more equal in terms of membership and sit down and wrestle some of these big issues.
I don’t think we can do it unilaterally. We can try, but if they are going to, on the other side, ignore the issues and how it impacts us, then it’s for naught. So let’s take it on.
Senator Batters: I have a couple of brief questions. First of all, the timing.
The Banking Committee, I understand, meets Wednesdays at 4:15 p.m. for a couple of hours and Thursdays at 11:30 a.m. for a couple of hours. Those are your regular meeting times. Those are similar to the meeting times that I have for the Legal Committee.
I’m just wanting your confirmation. It’s quite rare that those times would be interrupted by Senate sittings or votes; is that correct? It sometimes happens, but it’s quite rare.
Senator Wallin: Given our experience, if we have a key witness like the Governor of the Bank of Canada coming, we will schedule that on Thursday morning as opposed to Wednesday evening to try and deal with the fact.
But it’s a problem. We have these dual responsibilities. You need to be in the chamber to participate in that process and hear about other legislation and vote, and yet, you don’t want to forfeit any of your committee time. But we’re pretty lucky.
Senator Batters: Yes, exactly.
Regarding witnesses, it is my experience that, generally, steering committees certainly decide on witnesses, with the guidance, of course, of other members of the committee and along with Library of Parliament analysts and assistants in helping them decide who might be helpful for those particular studies or legislation.
Is that your experience as well? If you are finding that you are not getting the types of witnesses that you need, those should be things that go to steering committees to perhaps get better witnesses.
Senator Wallin: I’m a believer in that. You can’t have decision making by huge numbers of people. You would never get any resolution. We start at the beginning of every session — and I believe most committees do — and reaffirm the long-standing practice that steering committees set agendas and plan witnesses, and we do that in cooperation. So, yes, it comes right back on our shoulders.
If people do not think we’re getting a broad enough array of witnesses or the kind of witnesses, then, absolutely, raise it, but I always ask that people do it constructively. If you are not getting the right witnesses, please come with three names.
We just had this discussion last week at Banking, because we were dealing with Bill C-42 very quickly, which we will go to the House with today. I’ll report it today. We had several members say, “Look, I have a feeling that six months down the road, somebody is going to say there’s a giant loophole. Why didn’t you guys see it?” Literally, senators took it upon themselves to phone people they knew in the industry and ask them to come forward or to send us a note that we could get out to others and say, “Just think about this.”
How we have dealt with it at Banking is to try and have the ministers or the proposers of these bills not at the front of the session but at the end of the session. When you have taken your testimony, you have been educated, you have heard the critics, you have heard the supporters, then put your questions forward to the ministers or the person responsible. We are more informed at that point.
These are team exercises, and we all want to do the best job. We all are proud of the reputation of the Senate, and we’re glad to say in public that we often do the heavy lifting in this chamber, and we’d like that to be recognized and respected. In order for that to be the case, we need to do our homework, as my mother used to say.
Senator Cordy: Thank you, Senator Wallin, for being here today. It’s nice to hear from you.
Your point about mandates for private members’ bills coming from the chamber and not from the committee is definitely very relevant and should be studied, perhaps by this committee or some committee certainly. It is a good point.
I would like to talk about travel by committees. You spoke about the Kirby committee — it was the Social Affairs Committee — and the report on mental health, mental illness and addictions.
I was fortunate to be part of that committee. We travelled across the country. We met in small towns, big cities. We spoke to nursing professionals; we spoke to those with mental illness; we spoke with families, and we learned a lot. It’s because of that, I believe, that our report was so well received by the public, because people bought into it. People saw the committee travelling across the country.
I feel that it’s important for voices in the regions to be heard. It’s great to sit around the table in Ottawa — we do that most of the time — but the voices in the regions are important. Many people don’t want to come to Ottawa. We should be going to them.
I think people have the wrong idea of what it’s like when you travel with a committee. It’s long days. Then you get on the bus at the end of a really long day, and you travel to another community. You are up early in the morning because the bus is leaving at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning. These aren’t junkets by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, I’m hearing about committees that have done so much work on a subject matter, and when the time comes for them to do their one trip for the year, there is not enough funding for all committee members to go. I believe that is fundamentally wrong. If you have taken part in all of the discussions in Ottawa, you have attended the meetings, and then you are going to meet the Canadian public to listen to them and what they have to say, and the chair can only have 5 or 6 people and not 12 people or 16 people or whatever. You get my point. I think I see you nodding.
I wonder if, for the record, you could comment on that.
Senator Wallin: Again, I consider myself lucky at Banking because we don’t have a committee that really wants to do a lot of travelling, so that keeps us out of that particular fray. Because of technology now, the people we want to hear from and do business with are just as happy to do their Zoom call from New York or Washington.
In the case of this committee, we have occasionally travelled to the United States. I will just say that the benefit of that, regardless of the committee, whether it’s mental health or the state of the economy and the impact of inflation or interest rates, whatever it may be, you get a different sense when you travel.
As a journalist, we made this argument our entire lives. You don’t sit in Ottawa and Toronto and cover the Middle East. You don’t sit in your office in Ottawa and cover Parliament Hill. You need to actually go and know the people, speak to the people, recognize their faces, have contacts, have sources, have friends, whatever the case may be. That’s just part doing to our job.
I think travel is, for many committees, a key part of this. We are here as provincial representatives, and we can use that to make sure that we’re going to the right places and hearing from the right people.
Even in Saskatchewan, it’s obvious that you go to Saskatoon and Regina because it’s easier, and there are hotels and all of those things. I know when the Agriculture Committee recently went, they had a base, but they went out and spent the days out on those buses, walking around on fields. It’s important. You can’t understand the impact of whatever it is — the climate, the carbon tax, whatever it may be — unless you see it.
It’s really important. But we’re living in an age — and this is realistic — where you can be the Prime Minister, Governor General or a cabinet minister and everybody is going to ask about the $16 glass of orange juice or why the hotel room was as big as it was. That is reality and the world we are living in. I think it makes us penny-wise and pound‑foolish, and it undermines our ability to really do the kind of gut work that we need to do. Sometimes you need to look into somebody’s eyes and understand the impact of interest rates on their life and not just hear from the bankers on that. I do think it’s an important part of what we do.
Senator Cordy: Thank you very much for that. And technology has made a huge difference, but the personal touch is always well appreciated by Canadians, in the East and particularly in the West.
Senator Wallin: That set aside, I do think it’s important for people to understand what we do. If they can’t see it, it’s going to be very hard for them to understand it. So that’s the upside for us in terms of our institution.
Senator Cordy: And if a committee is travelling, should they get the amount to cover the costs of all members on the committee?
Senator Wallin: Yes, I know why the reason is no. But I have been on both ends of that, as a committee chair having to say you can’t all go and as a committee member saying, what do you mean? Maybe this committee — maybe these are larger issues because it has to do with budgeting. If you want this chamber to do its job and to be not only that national think tank but the sober second thought, we should be informed.
Senator Busson: Thank you, Senator Wallin, for being here. Your expertise, not just on banking but certainly over time, is absolutely valuable.
I don’t want to take a lot of your time — I’m going to paraphrase your statement — but you made a statement that different issues carry a different perspective in different parts of the country. Of course, one of the tenets of this Senate is regional representation. You and I also come from a province that has only six senators and when everybody is appointed, there are times that there are fewer senators from each of our areas.
I’m wondering if you could comment on how important you think regional representation is on committees and whether or not you think, as a point around that, smaller committees might help in allowing folks from smaller represented provinces to be more represented on these committees.
Senator Wallin: Yes, I think there are lots of benefits to smaller committees. They are more effective, more efficient. You can just target in and we all know that in any work situation. I sat on a university board and we had 50 members. Just by the time you’d counted the votes, you used half your meeting time. I do think that we need to struggle with that.
The regional representation is crucial. In general, what we are supposed to be bringing to the table are our regional vantage points. Even that depends on a whole lot of other factors. I don’t expect everybody in downtown Toronto to understand what the impact of the carbon tax on grain drying is, but I think we need a forum to have that discussion to educate ourselves because part of the thing is we all sit in the chamber and at the end of the day vote on all these bills. You can be up to speed on the committees that you have served on and therefore you have studied specific bits of legislation, but we’re still voting on bills where we didn’t sit on the committee and study. It does take an awful lot of work.
If we could be a little — this is pie in the sky — bit more flexible, if there is an area that you have interest and expertise in and there is a six-week committee to really wrestle that issue before the budget comes down and sends some notes off to government, it might be way more effective than a year-long study on the meaning of X, Y or Z. I would like to think that we could just really shuffle this up a little bit and rethink our approach to committees in general.
I would like to see that and I also think regional representation is important. I don’t think you can have a committee that has no expertise. Now, we have the issues of conflict, which we always have to be aware of. You can’t be president of a bank and sit on the Banking Committee, but in other cases you can be informed. If you have some understanding of the agriculture issues, then you should be on the Agriculture Committee. I sat on Communications and Transportation. I know a lot about communications; I know a lot less about transportation. That’s, again, a dated concept from when the train stations were the telegraph centres. It’s 2023, so let’s separate some stuff off. Maybe we need a stand-alone committee for a short while to deal with AI, because we could think of six committees that it might rightly go to, but maybe we need six people that really care to sit down and wrestle it and then come to the group.
Senator Busson: Just further to that, Monday meetings, in my perspective that interferes with regional representation. A very important committee, National Defence, sits on Mondays and it pretty much precludes anyone from the far reaches of this country.
Senator Wallin: I used to sit on National Defence as vice chair and again as chair, and I had to give it up because with the plane schedules — because I fly to Saskatchewan and then I drive — I would get home late Friday night and leave early Sunday morning. At a certain point, you are not doing your work in either place because we have responsibilities in our home provinces as well, and if I’m not getting there to accommodate my work here, then how do I balance that out? So it’s a big issue.
Senator Omidvar: Thank you, Senator Wallin, for being with us today. I’m going to ask a question related to your expertise in the communications field.
We have talked a lot here about senators doing good work, committees doing good work. I think we all know that the perception of senators and the Senate in the community is not as optimal as it should be. Do you believe that Senate committees, in particular the leadership of the Senate committees, should take a more active role in communicating the work that they do at committee to the public so it becomes a story that the public can consume?
Senator Wallin: A thousand percent. To me, it’s our job. We have put hard work and long hours into a report or a study, whatever it may be, and it deserves the attention. In the last year, we have had 13,487 visits to the Banking web page because we’re doing studies that are relevant. We’re talking about inflation and the economy. We’re talking about living in a data‑driven economy and how we inspire investment. We’re talking about housing. We’re talking about issues that are touching people.
Our reports downloaded 1,670 times. That’s encouraging because I know somebody somewhere has looked at the title and gone, whoa, that might be interesting and relevant to my work. But if I and other members of the committee are not out there waving the flag in the sea of information overload — it’s kind of the opposite. What we see governments do that with bad news — we have watched them all do it for decades — it’s the 5:00 announcement on Friday afternoon when you want to bury something. So we need to do the opposite of that, which is running around and being as public and as visible as we can with the work that we’re doing, and reaching out to the communities that are impacted. Our committee report that came out in June was right in the craziness at the end of June when all these bills are being passed, and it’s all about politics all day long.
So I waited until the end of August, and I took copies of that report literally with handwritten notes and sent them out to people who I’m pretty sure would have missed it all in the fray of June. Then you get attention back on the work that you are doing, and we’ll do that again. Our most downloaded report is on open banking. It’s several years old, but it’s basic, good information that people need to understand about what’s happening technologically.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: I was looking at meeting times and the meeting schedule. We know that committees can conflict with votes and regular Senate Chamber sittings. I am looking at committees that meet on Monday afternoons — there are always some members absent. I’ve been thinking about Friday mornings; we could ask to sit on Friday mornings for meetings, but we would have the same problem as on Monday afternoons.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to capitalize on the option for committees to have hybrid meetings? Perhaps that would be very helpful for Monday and Friday meetings. What do you think?
[English]
Senator Wallin: I’m not a big fan of online meetings. I love having the ability to have witnesses come to us online and to take testimony. I feel that there is something about the collegiality and how we spark off one another when we’re sitting in a committee, and I felt this myself in terms of sitting remotely during COVID. I just simply wasn’t as engaged. It was harder to be engaged because there were distractions and the technology was always going down and “you’re on mute” and all of those things that we saw and experienced.
I can understand that we might be able to do some things in a hybrid fashion, and perhaps that’s a thing we could do if we had smaller committees that were targeted on a specific issue in a limited time frame. I know a lot of us are kind of jealous watching cabinet ministers run around and vote on their phones and life is easy and all the rest of it. But the downside of that is also that I have been standing beside cabinet ministers who are at the airport and their assistant comes over and says, “Minister, you have to vote now.” And they go, “How am I voting? Yes or no?” They say, “You’re yes on this one.” Oh, okay. That’s the downside of it. I think we need to take that move very carefully and consider it.
I do think we need to incorporate technology in a much more direct way, both for ourselves and — there are lots of things we can do, and certainly for steering committees, we do that, because if everybody had to physically be around, it would never happen.
It’s more a question of the structure. I don’t happen to be, for example — this is completely off topic — a big fan of Question Period in the Senate. I don’t think it’s our job particularly to do that, whether it’s with the government house leaders or with ministers, but regardless.
Maybe we need to reconfigure our days so that people aren’t missing a lot. We have a sitting day that’s filled with the administrative stuff and the busy work that we need to get through and then expand the time for committees around that period.
Senator Cordy: I have just a quick question about the challenges that we have in scheduling committees. I know we went through COVID, and that was really brutal, but it doesn’t seem to be a whole lot better now.
We have heard suggestions from other committee chairs and deputy chairs that — and you made reference to it in your remarks earlier — perhaps some committees could have a longer meeting once a week, maybe three to four hours, which would also be pretty strenuous. Nonetheless, it would fit into a longer period of time when you would lose no time because it would just be a continuation. I know you touched on it, but would you expand on that a little?
Senator Wallin: Yes, I think we have to go back to scratch, and that may mean one committee meeting for four hours once a week and another committee meeting for three one-hour sessions. I know it gets complicated, especially when you’re using technology, because we go through this endless process of making sure the technology is going to work and if we send them the right headset, et cetera. I think we need to get a bit more comfortable with that.
I have been on Zoom calls, as we all have, with other organizations that don’t go through that. You just come on and you do your meeting and if you go down, you figure it out. We just have to get more comfortable ourselves with that. Translation, of course, is a huge issue and component there because the witnesses have to be able to have that.
I think we should look at a blank slate, and presumably that is what your committee is doing. I don’t know what others have said, but it is really time to rethink the process.
Senator Cordy: Thank you.
Senator Omidvar: There was a question about the committees that meet on Monday nights. You were at SECD, I’m at RIDR, and I know that those committees have low attendance, and they have technically no regional representation. It’s very hard to get the work done.
I wonder what you would say to an alternative that all committees should meet on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, any time between 8:00 and 1:00. That, of course, gets in the way of caucus meetings and group meetings. Should we consider asking caucus and group meetings to meet on Mondays and Fridays? That would give us the space, the translation and the resources to do committee work.
Senator Wallin: Well, I think everybody has fit their group meetings around the timing. The Canadian Senators Group meets on Tuesdays, and I don’t think we impact anything else that’s in there because we had to find a time where we could get together as a group without —
Senator Omidvar: But you do use translation resources and rooms.
Senator Wallin: Yes, for sure.
Senator Omidvar: And we have heard in this room that it is not just other issues, but it’s an issue of rooms and translation resources.
Senator Wallin: Yes. And again, we used to meet all the time. Lots of committees met in the Victoria Building, and they have good committee rooms there, big and small, and they are all sitting empty because we don’t have staff to do it. It’s a totally lost resource, which is why I think maybe we need to rethink.
These questions about how we access translation facilities, whether we can do some of that on contract — I think we just need to start from scratch on some of this and also look at how we sit as a body and have longer but predictable sessions. Then maybe we could have more of Wednesday for meetings and those kinds of things.
I think we have to be realistic. You have the same Monday problem that you have on Thursday night, and you certainly have it on Friday morning, which is that we do have an obligation to be in our home provinces. And again, this is not just going home to take a couple of days off. I was home at Thanksgiving and gave two different speeches and went to three public events. We have to do those things. We have to be present where we live. That part is important.
[Translation]
The Chair: Thank you very much. I have two questions. I waited until the end to ask them.
[English]
We’ve heard a lot of comments. Today we have a question and some issues that were not raised before.
There is one issue that was raised previously that I want to hear from you on. Would it be a good idea to divide our committee work into groups? We could have a legislative committee that does only legislation and thematic committees that do in-depth studies. What do you think about this way of operating? Some countries do that. Would that be a suggestion?
Senator Wallin: I think you get back to the same problem that Senator Cordy was raising, which is if you sit on a committee and you are not allowed to go on a trip because there is not enough budget, you are not having your input.
If you say here’s a group of people who will deal with all the legislation in Canada, and then the rest of us will think big thoughts about X, Y or Z, it’s a difficult choice that I would not want to have to make; I want to do both. So I don’t think we can do it that way.
One of the things you will remember, Senator Bellemare, is that the Banking Committee started this session with four large priorities — labour force, housing, cryptocurrency and the state of the economy. Groups of senators got together amongst themselves to talk about, inside labour market, what the key issues were; inside housing, what the key issues were. We might want to think about that in terms of some of the larger committees. We can break things down inside the group a little bit in terms of content but then come back together. It’s the same process we go through when educating ourselves about the bills we don’t get to study in an intense way because we don’t sit on that committee.
The Chair: I have another question for you. What do you think is the optimal task of a senator in terms of participating in committees, hours per week or numbers of committees, so that the work is done well?
Senator Wallin: I’m not sure what you are asking, whether we are obliged to participate in committees?
The Chair: No, what would be the number, if we had a number to tell —
Senator Wallin: Oh, dividing it up.
The Chair: — a senator when they do committee work? Should they be on four committees or two committees? What would be the optimal task for a senator?
Senator Wallin: I would say, realistically, two. I have tried three. I have done three and filled in for others when groups are small and all of that. I just personally feel that I’m not doing a good job of anything when I’m running around. I’m showing up, and I am a warm body in the seat. That’s not my job.
The Chair: I have done a lot of that. I have been here for a long time, and I’ve been on four committees, three, two. I think it would be two on average or one big and one small committee.
Senator Wallin: So much more responsibility exists now in terms of the issues and the speed with which we have to deal with those issues. It’s not like the old days where nobody was aware of the events that were going on in real time. We have to adapt to that. That means we have to be sharper, more well informed and present.
The Chair: Thank you very much. It was very interesting.
Senator Wallin: Thank you all very much.
[Translation]
The Chair: Thank you very much for your comments. I believe they will inform our future thinking. Next week, we will be having discussions on the various topics to see what our comments and observations are. Thank you and good day.
(The committee adjourned.)