The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: Senator Bellemare has a question. Senator Deacon, would you take a question?

Senator C. Deacon: Absolutely, thank you.

Senator Housakos: Will Senator Deacon take a question?

Senator C. Deacon: Absolutely.

Hon. Marty Deacon: Thank you, Senator Housakos, and everyone else who has spoken to this issue today. It brings out, as someone said, a number of themes that have emerged this week.

I’m going to take the word “COVID-19” out of the sentence. I would like your thoughts on this. I met last week with Waterloo business partnerships, 60 companies that all work together in the Waterloo region, and we talked about the workplace, what that meant moving forward, and what they were experiencing as presidents and CEOs. Someone commented, “Of course, you folks in the Senate are going to carry on in a hybrid format. I assume you would, because of the investment you’ve made and the environmental footprint.” They had four or five different reasons that paralleled their experiences and why they were going to carry on in this format.

I wonder, from a business perspective, and the folks you’re speaking to, if you’ve had that experience in your conversations also.

Senator Housakos: Thank you, Senator Deacon. That’s a very good question. I’ve had that discussion recently with my colleague Senator Seidman.

If you all remember during the early stages of COVID-19, many management consultants came to the conclusion that real‑life, on-site work environments would start seeing a decrease because law firms and companies were seeing the convenience and the time saved in terms of transporting people to and from work, as well as the reduction of overhead costs and unnecessary office space. As it turns out, two years into it, a lot of CEOs and corporate consultants, particularly in the United States, after a review, have found that productivity is starting to sink to such a degree that companies are starting to — even though they had originally planned to only bring back employees to work from their workplace in a reduced structure — come to the conclusion that it’s not cost-effective because productivity levels have shrunk drastically.

Of course, a case in point is right here in the Senate. Our productivity levels in terms of studies, committee work, output and oversight have completely diminished, but the savings have been marginal by comparison.

Senator M. Deacon: It will be interesting to monitor, in the months ahead, our various tables, particularly as they relate to — as you said — the efficiency of being in the Senate in person compared to being in the Senate virtually. Those are the pieces that we’re going to have to continue to wrangle. Thank you.

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Hon. Colin Deacon: Honourable senators, I’d like to thank you for taking this debate seriously and spending some time exploring the issue.

I want to reach well beyond COVID-19. The debate has been focused enormously on COVID, and I’m struck by the fact that in Nova Scotia, our doctors have started taking appointments by telephone. They have started renewing prescriptions by telephone. There have been cost savings, time savings and the enhancement of patient care. Yes, there are times when they say, “No, you have to come in for an appointment,” but a lot of the work can be done remotely through a telephone consultation.

That was something that had been discussed in this province for 20 years. All of a sudden when COVID-19 came along, it was implemented, and the benefits were so significant that it has now been extended permanently. COVID has actually provided us with an opportunity to innovate, change and improve how we do things. I think that’s worth looking at significantly.

I’ll go to what has been Canada’s largest company, the fastest company in the world to reach a billion dollars in revenue since inception, and that’s Shopify, which has chosen to be a remote‑first company. Looking at their employment pages that are advertising new positions, whether it’s in Asia, Africa, Europe, South America or North America, they are remote positions for highly technical sales and product development jobs. They have embraced this, and, according to their CEO, their productivity continues to increase.

We need to look at this from a broader standpoint and ask: What are the opportunities that could come from using hybrid in a properly resourced manner? I take to heart Senator Patterson’s concerns about the fact that we have not properly resourced hybrid because we have been going month to month. We have been taking a short-term approach rather than a strategic long‑term approach to our decision making here.

As we revisit this from a sober-second-thought perspective and look at it as something that could be an opportunity, I would like us to think about what benefit could be brought to bear for those who have far more difficult travel challenges than Senator Cordy and I do from Halifax, where you’re not just losing half a day but you’re losing a day in each direction. That commuting time is significant for us, but it’s also significant for other people we might want to be able to work with.

I’ve been struck by the tremendous meetings that I have been able to get. We get to know each other and start to work together quite effectively using virtual communications rather than in‑person communications, and it has provided us with some tremendous opportunities to have witnesses speak to us formally and informally. As you know, I did a session a couple of weeks ago with a Toronto company that, through their Australian operations, is helping to transform the Australian government’s use of blockchain in the collection of taxes, which has benefits for consumers, retailers, producers and the tax office. We got that great interview with one person in Adelaide, one person in Sydney and a group in Toronto all at the same time with a group of senators right across the country.

We have the ability to work with people that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to work with. If we start to constrain that benefit, I think it’s to our detriment.

The first year I was here, you would often ask senators if you would see them the next week, and they would say, “No, I have a medical appointment,” and as you well know, in many provinces, we can’t choose when our medical appointments are. That would cause them to be out of the chamber for a whole week if their medical appointment was mid-week.

There are a whole lot of benefits for us to continue some form of this work that is not related to COVID. I found that a huge amount of the debate was focused purely on COVID.

I look at this in terms of the employment opportunities for us with staff that are not located in Ottawa, people who wouldn’t or couldn’t move to Ottawa that we could have working for us in our offices. It’s a tremendous opportunity. I have benefitted from that personally in having folks for whom there wasn’t the budget to have them move in their own lives, because we can’t pay for our staff to move. But all of a sudden we’re working incredibly effectively at distance.

When I consider this issue, it goes well beyond the question of COVID, and it focuses on the benefits that we may be able to realize in a strategic way as an employer. I want us to be able to be as inclusive and competitive an employer as possible moving forward. I want to see senators apply for this job who maybe have issues with dependents, be they old or young, and can’t travel each week the Senate is sitting, but they still want to put in the hours and the work.

Certainly, I found rather troubling a few of the comments that were made, such as those suggesting that work isn’t being done if you’re not physically present in the chamber. That, to me, is an archaic way of managing in the 21st century. There are not very many employers who would get very far with employees if they start to view their employees in that manner and are not viewing people that they work with from the standpoint of productivity and evaluating that productivity based on its merit versus based on somebody’s physical presence. It worries me that that sort of attitude may limit whom we get to have work with us in the future.

There are all of those social and inclusive benefits, the travel benefits and the ability to have witnesses who are from very different locations than we have in the past.

We also have to start considering our carbon footprint. I am very proud of the fact that the chamber has committed to dealing with that aggressively, and what we will learn in doing that will help us do our job far better because we’ll have first-hand experience, and an ability to say, “Don’t just do as we say, but do as we are doing,” will help us to hold government to account on an issue that no government in Canada has lived up to in terms of commitments.

I want us to look at this debate as an issue that goes well beyond COVID. I think there is a tremendous opportunity as a parliamentary leader to show that there are ways to use new tools to become a more innovative employer and very much improve our productivity as an organization. To look at this purely through the lens of COVID is missing a great opportunity.

Thank you, Your Honour and colleagues.

Senator Housakos: Thank you, Senator Deacon.

I’m going to try to get you back to being focused on the motion at hand here. At a later date, we can have a discussion about the benefits of hybrid working in the private sector and public sector. I appreciate the opinion coming from a CEO of a Crown corporation, but let’s focus now on the motion at hand.

Will you not agree, Senator Deacon, that when it comes to the last two years of output, both of committee work and in the Senate, the number of dates we sat in comparison to any other two-year period in the history of the Senate — and the fact that we have actually dealt with less government legislation than ever before in those 24 months compared to any other cycle, fewer private members’ bills than during any other 24-month cycle and less output in terms of our committee work than any 24-month cycle — will you admit that there have not been many benefits of hybrid vis-à-vis productivity in the Senate?

My second question is actually not a question; I’m correcting the record. Hiring employees who can work virtually for senators has been around for eons. My first two policy advisors — one of them was working out of Vancouver and one was working out of Montreal. This is not new; COVID didn’t invent this. It has been around for decades where senators, via email, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, have been able to hire staff, so there has never been an impediment to hiring staff who can’t work out of Ottawa in order to substitute or provide the best possible support staff to senators.

However, back to my point. Show me any benefit we’ve received over the last two years in terms of productivity in the Senate because of hybrid sittings.

Senator C. Deacon: Thanks, Senator Housakos.

I would say that how we have chosen to manage this issue as an entity has more to do with that than using hybrid services.

On an incremental basis, we have chosen to extend hybrid versus embracing it. If we had embraced it, I think we would be having cost savings and productivity improvements. That’s hypothetical, but I believe that firmly.

I don’t think that, as we consider the use of hybrid, we should just look at COVID and the experience of how we have chosen to use hybrid over the last two years as the only way of looking at this issue. If we look forward, there are many benefits we could extract from this experience in terms of how to do things and in how not to do things.

The other thing I will just offer in terms of the point you made about staff is that senators’ offices are a part of the employment group of staff in this organization, but we also have an awful lot of staff scattered around the National Capital Region. Those staff are the Parliamentary Precinct. Those staff are expected to be physically present.

So there is an opportunity to reach beyond in terms of everyone who works within our organization. Thank you.

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: Senator Deacon, your time is up. We have still two senators who want to ask questions.

Would you like to ask for more time?

Senator C. Deacon: That would be great, Your Honour, if the chamber so chooses.