Thank you very much.
Stéphan and Paul and I are here this morning to present a business case regarding sustaining the transformation of parliamentary proceedings. As you know, over the past few years, at the request of members, the House administration has transformed its technology and its operations model to expand the ways in which members and Canadians can follow and participate in parliamentary proceedings.
Though it was not the only factor, the pandemic was certainly a catalyst for many of those changes. The House had to put in place very quickly a model that would allow us to continue sitting and voting by using technology. A lot of these changes have now become a regular part of working, not just for our proceedings but for all sorts of different kinds of events, which are now conducted with some form at least of video conferencing.
The changes are, of course, most pronounced in committees where now the vast majority of our meetings are webcast, which was not always the case, and contain at least some remote participation.
As we heard a little earlier in this meeting, increased remote participation has also had an impact on our interpreters, and the House has had to develop new tools and new processes to ensure their health and safety and ensure that all can participate in the language of their choice. To support these new requirements, the House has had to make investments in staffing and technology. These are staff to offer ongoing support and monitoring to ensure cybersecurity, to onboard and test witnesses, and to manage a whole series of new processes.
There are also capital costs relating to equipment and licensing. These are additional obligations that did not exist only a few years ago.
The House of Commons Administration did not request additional funds from the Board of Internal Economy for these activities. During the pandemic, reduced activities caused surpluses. It was also possible to reallocate staff from other projects, which became less and less possible when normal activities resumed.
Today's submission does not aim to hire new staff, but rather to maintain the teams we have built up over the past few years and to provide these new services. Procedural Services and Digital Services are currently running a deficit because of the high number of additional employees we have had to hire to support these activities. While the House of Commons Administration tries to be fiscally prudent by reallocating staff and funds where possible, there is nevertheless certainly a risk if we have to continue to rely on surpluses and carryforward funds to pay for activities that have become permanent.
I will very quickly deal with the different areas in which all of those changes have been made.
The four main fields are the House, the voting application, committees and, finally, interpreter health and safety.
In the House, of course, the first step to enable MPs to participate remotely was to invest in equipment. We also created support teams to monitor and resolve MPs' technical problems throughout the sitting. Staff also have additional tasks such as coordinating communications for sittings and for votes, responding to MPs' queries and liaising with the technical team. I would also like to point out that we've seen an increase in both average sitting hours and the frequency of late sittings. The ramifications of those increases are multiplied given that more staff is needed to support a session.
Regarding electronic voting, we have set up an application that enables MPs to vote from anywhere in Canada. This considerably increased the number of MPs taking part in each vote. In turn, support for the application is necessary, including dedicated cybersecurity resources to ensure the system's integrity, real-time troubleshooting and ongoing, regular maintenance. This also means additional tasks for procedural staff such as preparing and managing information in the application.
The additional expectations are probably most pronounced in committees where, once upon a time, most committee meetings were audio only with a limited number of meetings being televised, mostly in person. If anyone participated by video conference, they had to travel to a studio that was operated by a third party. Today, the reality is that most public meetings are either webcast or broadcast. Almost all meetings have at least some participants participating by video conference, or at least we have to prepare for a circumstance where anybody could participate by video conference and they could do so from just about any location.
Even if one were to do away with the hybrid aspects for members of Parliament, it would probably not be feasible to go back to the old model for witnesses. The expectation now for witnesses is that they are able to appear using familiar video conferencing software from their homes or their offices.
To ensure adequate sound quality for interpretation, there was a series of extra supports that had to be put in place. The support requirements for witnesses have increased dramatically, including the shipping of headsets, a series of pretests and the ongoing monitoring. There are also challenges in managing the capacity for meetings, which has resulted in longer blocks of committee meetings over the day. That creates additional resource pressures.
The costs for video conferencing in committee were, once upon a time, charged to each committee's budget, back when we were using a third party, and that was paid out of the Liaison Committee envelope. That is no longer the case, and those have been absorbed by the House administration.
I'll let Stéphan, very briefly, also touch on what we've done in terms of supporting the interpreters.