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.