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37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Joint Committee on the Library of Parliament

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Thursday, May 8, 2003

0905

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin (Lauzon, Lib.))

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.))

Professor Stephen Coleman (Cisco Visiting Professor of e-Democracy, Oxford Internet Institute)

0910

0915

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Miss Deborah Grey (Edmonton North, Canadian Alliance)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

0920

Miss Deborah Grey

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Ms. Wendy Lill (Dartmouth, NDP)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

0925

Ms. Wendy Lill

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

0930

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Mr. Andrew Telegdi (Kitchener—Waterloo, Lib.)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

0935

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Mr. Andrew Telegdi

Prof. Stephen Coleman

0940

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Ms. Marlene Catterall (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

Ms. Marlene Catterall

0945

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Mr. Jerry Pickard (Chatham—Kent Essex, Lib.)

0950

Prof. Stephen Coleman

0955

Mr. Jerry Pickard

Prof. Stephen Coleman

1000

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

The Joint Chair (Mrs. Carolyn Bennett)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

1005

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Miss Deborah Grey

Prof. Stephen Coleman

1010

Miss Deborah Grey

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Senator Michael J. Forrestall (Dartmouth and the Eastern Shore, PC)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

1015

Mr. William Young (Acting Director, Political and Social Affairs Division, Library of Parliament)

1020

1025

Mr. Peter Niemczak (Research Assistant, Library of Parliament)

1030

Mr. William Young

Mr. Joe Peters (Consultant, Library of Parliament)

1035

Mr. William Young

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Mr. William Young

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Mr. William Young

Mr. Joe Peters

Mr. William Young

Mr. Peter Niemczak

Mr. William Young

1040

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Prof. Stephen Coleman

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Miss Deborah Grey

Mr. William Young

Miss Deborah Grey

Mr. William Young

Miss Deborah Grey

1045

Mr. William Young

Miss Deborah Grey

Mr. William Young

Mr. Joe Peters

Miss Deborah Grey

Mr. Joe Peters

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Senator Michael J. Forrestall

Mr. William Young

Senator Michael J. Forrestall

Mr. William Young

Senator Michael J. Forrestall

Mr. William Young

1050

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

Mr. Andrew Telegdi

Mr. William Young

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin)

CANADA

Standing Joint Committee on the Library of Parliament

NUMBER 004

2nd SESSION

37th PARLIAMENT

EVIDENCE

Thursday, May 8, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¿ (0905)

[English]

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin (Lauzon, Lib.)): Good day.

We have a very interesting and even fascinating session. It's all on the matter of e-democracy and e-consultation, and we have a very distinguished guest, Dr. Stephen Coleman, who is professor of e-Democracy at Oxford. I will ask Carolyn to introduce our guest and then we will hear from him.

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.)): This is a pleasure. I think I did a small commercial last week, Professor Coleman, in suggesting that you come.

As a parliamentary committee that is hugely interested in the re-balance between government and Parliament, we see the Library of Parliament has an important role in that, in getting newer and better information and in getting independent information to parliamentarians so they can do their job around scrutiny. We think it's very exciting that you are here to talk to us about how we could perhaps do that job better in terms of both the work you've done on scrutiny of Parliament and of course what you've done on the role of consultation with citizens in looking at draft legislation.

Thank you very, very much for coming.

Professor Stephen Coleman (Cisco Visiting Professor of e-Democracy, Oxford Internet Institute): Thank you for inviting me.

I really want to try to answer three questions in the brief time I have. First of all, why is it that we in Britain, particularly in work with the British Parliament, have seen a connection between the Internet and the reinvigoration of democracy? Second, what have we actually done, and third, what are the key lessons we've learned?

The reason we've seen the connection is that we are of the view, through research and not just speculative research but practice, that the Internet is becoming a ubiquitous medium, that it is going, to some extent at least, to reshape the nature of political communication, and that the key element of that reshaping is interactivity.

That is to say, the politics of transmitting messages is going to decline and the politics of interacting is going to increase. You can't simply send out a speech, a message, or an advertisement without utilizing the inherent feedback path that is within digital technology, enabling the receiver to then become a producer of information. It seems to us that this is central to what perhaps is something like a paradigm shift in the nature of political communication.

At the same time, there is a backdrop of significant voter disengagement and civic disenchantment, not just in British or Canadian democracy but across the western democracies and indeed even in the new democracies of Europe. What we are seeing is a reduction in voter turnout, cynicism towards political institutions, and political parties in some cases in a state of really quite severe decline.

Perhaps the most important political characteristic of this problematic area is the decline in civic efficacy. That is to say, if you ask most people in most countries whether they think they can influence anything or whether they think they're being listened to, they will respond that they don't think they can influence much and they don't think they are heard very much.

Now, my research has indicated that people don't actually want to govern. It will be no surprise to any of you that there is no public appetite in this country or in others for direct democracy. But there is a public interest in being heard, and that is the key issue. People want to be acknowledged. They want to be, as many people would say these days, respected in the process of democratic decision making.

So that's the context. Within that context the British Parliament decided to run a series of experimental online consultations to see whether you could bring in evidence through the Internet in ways you couldn't do in other forms. We ran 10 of these online consultations in the British Parliament between 1998 and 2002, and they have proved to be so relatively successful that Parliament is now making a decision about how to turn this into a routine procedure in its day-to-day work.

So what have these online consultations been about? Well, I should say what they're not, because I think that's helpful in focusing on what they are. We are not talking here about Internet chat rooms, about people going into some space where they all talk at once, say what they think, and have a good time. There's nothing wrong with people doing all those things, but a parliamentary or governmental space is not the space to do it.

Neither are they online letter boxes. In other words, it's not simply a way of posting a message to a parliamentary committee or whoever and saying, this is what we think you ought to be doing. Nor are they online polls or surveys; it's not a tick box activity.

The object of these online consultations has been to gather together a group of members of the public over the course of one month to discuss a particular policy issue, to discuss it alongside elected representatives and tell their stories, to explain what they think ought to be done, but what is equally important, to listen to each other, to learn, and even to change their minds--and this does happen.

So these are deliberative; the key thing here is, they are about public deliberation and deliberation of a kind that can help to produce better scrutiny and better legislation.

¿ (0910)

I'm quite happy to answer any questions about those specific consultations, but they have varied from consultations on specific pieces of legislation to consultations with traditionally marginalized groups like women who are victims or, as they use the word, “survivors” of domestic violence, also people who are chronically sick, and so on.

The process for running these online consultations is very important. They are highly moderated. They involve the recruitment of stakeholders so no voices are left out. In other words, this is not simply a spontaneous process.

What have been the lessons we have learned from this? I think there are three principal lessons. First of all, politically in a sense the lesson is that all those involved in this process seem to have found it very useful. The politicians--and I have some quotes from politicians I can pass on to you--who were in charge of benefiting from these consultations found that they really did bring some new evidence to scrutiny and to thinking about legislation.

As a way of producing what I call two-way accountability, this was something that was really changing the nature of accountability. Also, those citizens who were involved found them very useful, and those citizens who were involved came out of them with a higher sense of efficacy, which in terms of public participation and what one might call social capital is a really important factor.

The second issue we have found from these is that it's necessary for parliaments to set out principles, to set out some kind of charter of principles about how they are going to use the Internet in the context of public participation.

I learnt this when I went with a group of British parliamentarians to visit the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Parliament, formed in 1999, had a really good opportunity to set things out anew, and what they did was to create a set of principles on how to use information and communication technologies in the service of better democracy.

When the British House of Commons Information Committee sat down to do the same thing, it too produced a set of principles, which I have here with me and can pass on to you, setting out first, principles for the use of the Internet, and second, principles for running online consultations, which I think are helpful.

The third lesson from all of this, I suppose in terms of general direction, is a kind of paradoxical conclusion. The conclusion is that one should proceed pragmatically, experimentally, and incrementally. In other words, one shouldn't assume that one can bring about something called e-democracy or digital democracy as some sort of blueprint for Utopia. One is here using a particular technological tool to do things better and to do some things that haven't been done before.

So proceed slowly. Evaluate what one does. This is the nature of experimentation.

The other part of the paradox is, be creative and be innovative. One should not use these new technologies in order to replicate bad practices or obsolete practices that have existed in the offline world. There is nothing worse than to take something that is dull and meaningless to people in the wider world, put it on the Internet, and simply tell more people about it more quickly; that doesn't help at all.

In a sense this is very much about scrutinizing one's own practices and seeing how they relate to the wider public. Public participation can only in fact be enhanced through the Internet if the nature and quality of that public participation is of a kind the public can culturally relate to. That, I think, sets out some of what we've done and what we've learnt.

¿ (0915)

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you very much.

Ms. Grey.

Miss Deborah Grey (Edmonton North, Canadian Alliance): Thank you very much. We appreciated that.

I think all of us would agree that there are great blessings attached to it but also great curses in that we are just absolutely swamped in this online world. It's interesting that you have done some very interesting experimentation, and it might do us well to do that too in our Parliament. Surely, I think, there would be some benefits.

In your remarks you said--correct me if I'm wrong--there is really no appetite here or in other countries for direct democracy but people want to be heard. In fact, one of the main reasons I as a Reformer came to Parliament was for that very reason of direct democracy. There are several people in Canada who want to really engage in participatory democracy through constituent assemblies or referendums, all kinds of visual, tangible things people can participate in.

I would ask you to clarify that. If you maintain that position, I will disagree with you on that point. You say they do want to be heard and acknowledged, and I agree with that 100%, that people do want to know that somebody somewhere is listening to them and paying attention. Could you just clarify your remarks on direct democracy.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: I take your point. I think there is an appetite for that level of direct democracy. I think what there is not an appetite for--and I should have been clear about this--is the kind of direct democracy some advocates of the Internet and democracy were talking about in the middle of the 1990s, which was that you get rid of Parliament, you get rid of governments, and you vote on everything; you know, press this button if you want a war in Iraq. I don't think that that is a kind of democracy the public feel cheated as a result of not having.

The public want representation, you're quite right of course. They also want the kind of opportunity to get involved in.... Also, incidentally, my own view is that at a very local level, some elements of absolute direct democracy may well work; who knows?

But I certainly think that there is not any kind of political mood to get rid of representative democracy. The mood is to change what representative democracy means from what is really a 19th century conception to a 21st century conception.

¿ (0920)

Miss Deborah Grey: Excellent. I agree with that too.

Maybe we would be nervous in this country to actually have a referendum on whether we should blitz Parliament or politicians or anything else.

Anyway, thank you. That was a fascinating presentation. I appreciate it.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Ms. Lill.

Ms. Wendy Lill (Dartmouth, NDP): Thank you very much.

About this idea of direct democracy, the other day I was just going for a walk and I saw someone coming towards me. You could see they recognized who I was, I was the M.P., and they immediately stopped me and had about five minutes' worth of complaints about all sorts of things. Then they left, and they were relieved because they had in fact put those concerns where they thought they belonged, on their representative.

It's interesting; talk about direct exchange of responsibility. You're right that they certainly don't want to be here but they do want to be heard. There is that sense, we want to be heard.

I've been very involved with the e-consultation process we've been doing with the Library of Parliament around the status of persons with disabilities, and we're going to be talking more about that today. You know about it because we modelled it a lot after what you've been doing. I think it's been very useful, and it has hooked into people who want to have a say and have a lot to say, so this is all very good.

I'd like to know whether you have been able to determine at the end of the day after all the material has been synthesized whether it has any greater impact on changes to policies than, say, just a traditional go across the country, hear a thousand people, and write a thousand-page report. Are we seeing any more effective avenues of change occurring because of this new technological tool?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: Hmm. Well, I think that is clearly an important question.

Just to respond to your first point about people coming up to you in the street, I think that is exactly the point. I refer to that as not direct democracy but direct representation. It seems to me that if one can in a way play around with those terms, we might say that we don't have direct democracy at the moment, we have indirect representation. What something like digital technology is going to help us to do is to get a more direct kind of representation, just as you might want a more direct relationship with your doctor, your supermarket, or whoever, and people clearly do.

But on the point about effects, well, I have one caveat before I say anything, and that is, it is extraordinarily difficult within political science to determine the effects of anything at all, including a person's vote. Indeed, people might argue that voting, which is a most basic form of participation, is the one that has least effect in terms of any kind of measurable outcome. It is very difficult to say that A leads to B, but I think we can see three sorts of effects occurring as a result of these online consultations.

The first of them is in the formulation of policy. From the online consultations I have been involved in--I've been involved in all 10 of the ones the British Parliament has run--what we have found is that there were parts of legislation that changed as a result of specific points raised in those consultations.

In the case of the most recent consultation, the one on the communications bill--and that was a very big, very complex bill--it was the first time Parliament had put a bill out for public consultation. The committee looking at that bill said they changed two parts of the bill as a result of information that came in through the online consultation, information they hadn't received in any other way and wouldn't have received. So I think we can see there and in several other cases some policy changes.

But I just want to suggest that there are two other elements of effectiveness that may not simply have to do with policy change. One of them is in public efficacy. Again, I come back to this point about efficacy. People go away from a consultation feeling they have been heard, that they are more part of the process, and that is in itself a measurable and important effect.

The third one, which has a meaning in terms of deliberative democracy but lesser in terms of more practical motions of democracy, is confirmation. People may well, without ever having a consultation, think they're right, but one of the values of consultation of this kind is that more people are able to confirm that you're going in the right direction, that they share your values, and that they see what you're doing.

So I think that in all three of those ways there is actually a significant net gain from online consultations.

¿ (0925)

Ms. Wendy Lill: Just on the second one, the issue of public efficacy, I'm just wondering--playing the devil's advocate--is this not simply, okay, this is the newest kid on the block type of thing? People who spent many hours coming before committees certainly must have felt included for those hours they were there, but if they didn't see any of the changes they had been speaking about, then what did it matter? I'm just wondering, if a year down the road after a lot of these e-consultations have happened but people feel continually excluded, will they back away from that process? That's a problem.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: It's a good question. This is a question for empirical research. We can only at this stage speculate about this. We in fact have to measure that. We have to see whether this is in fact sustained efficacy or not.

But we do know something about efficacy. Efficacy, political theorists think and I think, is rather more like being in love than like having a sort of momentary fancy, to put it in those terms. We think that if you have a sense of efficacy, this is not like saying, I saw that political party on television last night and I like what they said about cutting my tax bill, so I'm going to vote for them. This is much more about having a sense of, I think these people are on my wavelength; they're listening to me.

We think that this doesn't switch on and off all that often. It may well only change once or twice in a person's life. You reach a certain stage in life where you think you don't know anything about Parliament, then you reach a state where you say, I don't know anything about Parliament but what I know is, they have nothing to do with me; I don't like those people and they don't represent what I think. And then you reach a stage where you think, actually, they do; they have something to do with me, I want to vote for them, I want to think about them, I want to know more about them.

If that analysis is correct, then we are indeed seeing a more solid kind of efficacy being constructed here.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you.

Senator Forrestall, do you have a question?

It's just a brief supplementary to my colleague's. It's interesting that after 38 years I am now alienated from the process. I have been through every stage once or twice.

How do you place the well-being of the member of Parliament in this process? After a while, it seems to me, he becomes alienated from people and doubtful about any suggestions.

Things have come to me in writing. If the first paragraph doesn't grab me, I don't read the last one. I'm cynical because I have allowed this process to get to me and I shouldn't have. I should have never gone to the Senate--that's one of the things I shouldn't have done.

Is there an observation or comment you can make about the virtues or the problems of e-consultation vis-à-vis the elected person?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: I met a member of the Scottish Parliament who told me he didn't reply to any letters that were sent to him from his constituents. I asked him why and he said, well, if it's important enough, they'll write to me a second time. So I suppose you're right, there always has to be a filtering mechanism to determine what is important and what isn't, what you should listen to and what you shouldn't.

This, I think, goes to a much wider kind of problem, which is that we have no training for elected representatives in most countries. We don't have a sense of what this institution is supposed to be about. Parliaments are in a state of some identity crisis all across the world, it seems to me. You know, these are real problems.

I think I would respond by saying that representative institutions exist within communication environments. Parliaments generally came about within the communication environment of print, although in fact the British Parliament came about before the process of the printing press. But generally speaking, these are print environments and one thinks in terms of books and papers.

Since the late 1950s and early 1960s politics has been transformed by television, and we are familiar with the way television has made politics faster, to some extent more superficial, and more image-based. The thing I'm interested in grappling with here is, what happens when interactive technologies enter into the picture? How does that reshape the way politics goes on? One thing I'm in no doubt about is that it will reshape the way politics goes on; the doubt is about how.

It's possible that the result of the Internet coming into politics will be in all the worst ways. Members of Parliament will be absolutely swamped by e-mails, by a faster form of communication they can't cope with and don't want to cope with. There will be use of all of the technologies to do things that bring the worst kind of messages in.

I think the only way to avoid that from happening is to take control of it. If you want to have control over the nature of the messages that come in, then you have to design channels to bring those messages in. One of the things online consultation does is, it essentially provides a structured voice for the public. It provides a means of a public explaining and informing in ways that are manageable. I think that just as it's useful to make sense of television by essentially making a deal with television and working out how you can use it to your own ends, exactly the same is true of the Internet.

None of what I am saying is going to stop politics from being politics or the public from being the public. There will still be members of the public who are going to have misguided ideas, who are going to be apathetic, or who are going to be unappreciative about all kinds of things they might otherwise have appreciated. There are always going to be politicians who are going to be doing things the public don't like. Politics is always going to be complex.

I don't think any of that is going to change because of a technological application. What I think can change is the way in which you organize that constellation so it actually makes sense to more people and works more effectively.

¿ (0930)

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Mr. Telegdi, do you have a question?

Mr. Andrew Telegdi (Kitchener—Waterloo, Lib.): Yes. One of the things with e-democracy I wonder and am sort of concerned about is that some of this is sociologically based and some groups have easier access to the Internet. When you talk about groups being disaffected, what happens to those people who are already on the margin? I think that's important.

I really see some of the useful tools you have, obviously getting e-mail direct and entering into a dialogue on an issue that's happening right now. It helps one evolve one's thinking. I can say which group I'm getting that from. How about the ones who don't have a voice now, and what kind of way can you go to offset that and compensate for that?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: I think that is an extremely important point and one that we've attended to in the consultations we've run. You have to go out and recruit those people who might not ordinarily feel they could give evidence in Parliament, who might not ordinarily feel that they could have access to the Internet, and who might not actually think they have anything particular to say but still ought to be heard.

For example, in the consultation on domestic violence, over half the women who participated in that consultation had never used the Internet before. They'd never sent an e-mail to anyone.

This was a conscious effort to bring people into the discussion. Again, I make the analogy with television. If you are running a television studio debate on the question of poverty, then you'll want to bring poorer or more disadvantaged people into the studio, but you don't expect them to have their own television studio or their own ability to run television.

Again, we have to think about the Internet much more in terms of a resource some people have more of, some people have less of, some have none of, but everybody is affected by. As a communication resource, it's something we have to actually make efforts to bring people into.

Part of that is a question of public policy, and obviously there are all kinds of policy issues about universal access and the need to get everyone online and to have public access centres. In Britain we now have 6,000 free Internet access centres, more than there are post offices. We are trying to do some work on that.

We also in Britain have an unusual situation where more people have access to the Internet through their television sets than through their personal computers. Of course, the people who have access through digital television are the poorer people in society; they are the ones who tend to subscribe to digital television. So we have a peculiar solution to the digital divide in some respects, which I know is unique to the U.K. at the moment.

The other part of my answer would be yes, even with the digital divide I think we have to practise some of this for the point, which we shall surely reach, where we will have universal or near-universal access to the Internet. When I started work on online consultations in the U.K. in 1998, only 2% of U.K. homes had home access to the Internet. It is now round about 50%, still 10% lower than in Canada, but it's moving in the direction of universal access.

¿ (0935)

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett): Tell us just a little bit about what you did with the domestic violence forum. You actually went into the hostels.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: Yes, this involved sending people into hostels, into people's homes--by invitation of course--to help them to get access to the Internet, very often to provide them with computers as well and to teach them how to use them.

This isn't just about teaching people the technology, it's also about teaching people to have the confidence to express a point of view. These are people who have stories to tell but very often there are literacy problems, keyboard skill problems, and all kinds of very basic things that get in the way of being able to tell them. So considerable efforts were made to do this.

Indeed, in the case of the domestic violence consultation, one of the first people to come onto the consultation was an illiterate woman, a gypsy from the south of England. With assistance, she was able to tell her particular story about domestic violence, and it turned out to be one of a thousand pieces of evidence that came in over the course of that month. So it is very much about putting resources into giving people assistance.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Mr. Telegdi, you had a further question.

Mr. Andrew Telegdi: The other one is, you mentioned the process of disenchantment, voter turnoff, and what have you. The more we get into mass communications--and really, e-consultation can quickly become that--we see that governments and corporations and what have you can easily shape messages. If people consult with you, you have a long list of e-mails, but with the spam we get and the way we want to control that, what care do you take to stop it from becoming a tool of propaganda?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: Considerable care. There is vetting and filtering of these consultations to make sure there is not organized registration. One of the things we do is to filter the web to see if any of the interest groups are trying to tell people to get into these consultations.

In the end you can't have complete control over this, you're absolutely right. That's again part of the nature of politics; you might say it's part of the healthy nature of politics. You could argue that if online consultations are seen as being effective enough for lobbyists to want to try to hijack them, then that is to their credit. That is demonstrating that real politics is happening. But one has to stop that from happening.

My sense is, however, that the new interactive medium is different from earlier ones in this respect. People in the online world value one thing more than anything else, and that is the authenticity of the messages. Because they're dealing with disembodied messages and they don't see a person, they like to get a sense of experience.

I know the MPs in Britain who've taken part in this found this very interesting. They scored a lot of points when they told stories about themselves and their lives, when they were able to relate to the experience of other people rather than when they gave a list of what was in their previous manifesto. That's going to be a kind of a skill change in a sense in terms of what politicians might be having to do in this particular medium, but I'm quite sure that's what the medium is going to call for.

In that context, even if you're a lobby group that gets in here with a message to sell, propagandizing goes down very badly online. I think it's one of the reasons, incidentally, online election campaigning has been such a failure, because it's taking something that just doesn't go down well in the online world.

¿ (0940)

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you.

Ms. Catterall.

Ms. Marlene Catterall (Ottawa West—Nepean, Lib.): I'm sorry I couldn't be here for your presentation, and I look forward to reading it when the record comes out.

I held a consultation on our foreign policy in my riding in the traditional way recently, and I had what Jane Jacobs calls the indispensable one-tenth of 1% of my riding there, so there were a hundred people.

We always do it with a bit of a panel presentation, a discussion with the panel, and then a round table, so everybody gets to have their say and there's an exchange of views. One very bright, politically engaged young woman at the end said, you know, the problem with e-consultation is that it doesn't give you any context and it doesn't give you an exchange of views; it doesn't require you to take into account other people's point of view.

I gather that you're doing some interesting things that overcome that barrier, but nonetheless, how in your view does the quality of exchange online compare to a sort of real-life exchange between people?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: There are two parts to that. In terms of the exchange of views, these are very much deliberative exercises. Empirically, we have observed that there is more exchange of view in a one-month-long online consultation than in any number of public meetings. The percentage of people who speak in an online consultation is higher than in the average meeting, and the variety of people who speak is going to be greater.

Part of that has to do with the second part, which is context. Face-to-face context has a plus and a minus. The plus is absolutely the capacity to judge other people's body language and so on. The downside is that many people find it very difficult to engage in that kind of face-to-face discussion.

In fact, one of the things we know from a great deal of research is that the vast majority of all political discussion that ever takes place takes place in the home. People like to talk about politics in the home for two reasons. Some of you may not believe this but it is true; one reason is, it avoids disagreement. You know before you have a discussion with somebody in your home, roughly speaking, what sort of values they have. People are very afraid about disagreement. It's one of the main reasons people don't like to discuss politics in public.

The second reason is that people feel comfortable in their own homes. They feel they have control. They know where they can go if they don't like what's happening.

So in that sense, having a public discussion in people's private homes is really quite a clever way of creating a context in an environment in which people feel comfortable. There is evidence to suggest that people find it more comfortable and uninhibiting than in a public place.

But I accept your point. In another context, there's been quite a bit of research about things like online therapy, and there have been arguments that people who need various kinds of therapeutic support may benefit from this kind of non-face-to-face context. My own intuition is that just as many if not more would benefit from having the face-to-face context.

I don't think one wants to suggest here that because the Internet is a good thing for democracy, we should all then become disembodied and live in a totally virtual world. Of course not. I think the issue is, what can we do in that virtual world that is more convenient and that adds new things to the dimension of political discourse?

Ms. Marlene Catterall: How do you deal with the issue of who is affected? We all have constituents who will call us and rant about something and say, now, why aren't you voting the way your constituents want? They're assuming of course that what they want is what all my constituents want.

I suppose one could poll everybody every day on every issue. However, I've often said that democracy is not an adding machine: 90% of people may feel one way about an issue and only 10% feel another way, but if the 10% are the ones who are affected, then obviously their opinion matters more. So how can e-consultation make those kinds of value assessments of the views and information coming in?

¿ (0945)

Prof. Stephen Coleman: There are ways, not ways we've experimented with in a parliamentary context, but ways I've experimented with in a purely research context. There are ways of weighting comments within a consultation, which is something we do quite often in large scale offline consultations.

There is somebody in Belfast--and it's relevant that they're from Belfast in Northern Ireland--who invented an online tool called a “preferendum”, and the preferendum is a way of getting people to vote for particular options in order of the salience of those options to their own lives. In the Northern Irish context that has proved to be extraordinarily important because although you're never going to get what you want, the question is, how do you get the second or third thing you want? The preferendum is a really quite clever way of aggregating the consequences of a point of view and seeing what they may be.

There are all kinds of tools and methods one can experiment with in relation to that. I also think what you've just said was really what I was trying to say in relation to direct democracy, that there really isn't a sense on the part of the public that numbers should count on these.

I do perform a lot of online polling, and we have a rather clever organization in the U.K. that has a panel of 80,000 people who are paid on a daily basis to be polled on various issues. They're paid very small amounts of money but they do it, and I am able to put questions into this poll.

Even during the buildup to the Iraq War, when a majority of people in Britain were opposed to the idea of going to war against Iraq, if you asked those people the next question, do you think the government should be bound by your view on this, they answered no. They may be wrong. Maybe they ought to think the government should be bound by their view, but they don't, and there is very little evidence to be found that the public sees a relationship between its own aggregated opinions and what the government must do or what parliaments must do.

What they do, however, see a relationship between is the fact that they have a considered view, a considered preference or a considered interest, and whether anyone hears it at all. It's being heard that really is the key issue.

And actually, that's not just relevant to politics. That's an observation many of us have made, that in late 20th century and early 21st century cultural life it has established that people want to be respected, perhaps, more than they want to have power.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): That's very good.

Mr. Pickard.

Mr. Jerry Pickard (Chatham—Kent Essex, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Professor Coleman, your concepts are very interesting. Do you have any numbers on the dynamics of those who would use the Internet to be involved in the consultation process?

My view--a very shallow view but my view--is that many of our seniors are not adept at using the Internet; we're working at that in all of our societies. I would think that there are certain people who have certain skills--machine skills or talents--who are familiar with the process of how the Internet works and who are very comfortable working within that atmosphere. In my view, their views may be heard overly often vis-à-vis other portions of the population.

Another part of that comes into management problems I and all of my colleagues have, and that is, in the last 15 years the dynamic of my job has truly changed because of the Internet and Internet communication. I used to respond to letters from my constituents, and if letters came from other areas of the country, I would refer them to other members of Parliament.

With e-mail you no longer can do that. You're not dealing with your constituents, or at least you really don't have addresses for most e-mail that does come in, so you have a much different scope. One person may have every member of Parliament on their list--hit one button and fire a message off 300 times or 400 times--and that's another part of this consultation process that makes it difficult. I can foresee a time I would need an army of people, and I don't have the resources to do that. So management is a major problem for all of us and is becoming more of a major problem for all of us in attempting to answer....

Now, if someone writes me, I don't decide what the letter says by the first paragraph...to make a comment there. The fact is, I feel it's important that I try to get back to people, but I'm finding it's getting overwhelming at various times. Where at one time my staff may have gone through 20 or 30 letters a day, at certain times they can have 500 or 600 now, and that's certainly not something we can handle with the finances we have.

One, how do we control and manage the type of thing you're talking about, and two, is it the broad spectrum of people we're hearing from or is it a narrow group of people who are very familiar and comfortable with the process at present?

Now, maybe that will change in the future too, but I anticipate this will become a greater demand on all of us. I won't point to it as a problem, I'll point to it as something we have to learn to manage better.

¿ (0950)

Prof. Stephen Coleman: On the second point about management and overload, I sympathize with you. I can see it in the British Parliament all the time. MPs are being similarly overloaded, strained by the amount of e-mail they're getting. It's difficult to cope with.

There are some proposals made in the report of the Information Committee, which looked at that in the U.K., and I'd be quite happy to pass them on to you. In turn, it learnt quite a lot from the Congress online project in the United States, which has been doing some interesting work on e-mail filtering and e-mail management.

To some extent, it seems to me that this is part of the general problem that parliaments everywhere are under-resourced. If you're trying to run a large national institution, then in a sense you should be not constrained by these kinds of resource limitations, which prevent MPs from getting messages from their constituents. But I accept the point that this needs procedures and it needs protocols about how to send e-mails, how to address them, and how to deal with them.

I can deal with more directly with your other point, about who is responding. There is a demographic skew, you're absolutely right, and it's quite an interesting one. The people who are most likely to use the Internet or any other digital information technology are people between the ages of 18 and 30. They are of course also the people who are the least likely to vote and the least likely to have an interest in politics. So there seems to be something of a happy match there, that you're bringing in people who might otherwise not get involved.

People over the age of 60 are not significantly less likely to use the Internet; they will use the Internet if they have a reason to use it. Because these are people who are on the whole much more civically involved and interested in the political process, they do actually make use of this. One of the 10 consultations the U.K. Parliament ran was with people over 65. There were very many of them putting messages up, using this, and sharing views.

There are, however, some other demographics that are worth taking into account, for example between men and women. From my own research I can tell you that if you go to most public politics websites--I'm talking about the BBC or the CBC now, these sorts of things--something like eight or nine out of ten of all of the messages on political websites come from men and not from women.

There is, however, a piece of quite interesting research I did during the 2001 election in Britain that had a very different result. And that was, when you asked people about sending e-mails to their friends and family about politics, the majority of those who said that they did this were women. So it seems women are talking to each other and men are talking to everyone, and someone might say, what's new?

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Stephen Coleman: It would be wrong to say there aren't demographic skews in terms of the way people use the Internet. In an online consultation you start out by asking what those demographic imbalances are likely to be, and then you address them. If it is the case that you want to hear from people who are affected by, say, a particular welfare plan and if it's the case that a third of those people are likely to be retired people, then you have to go out and make conscious efforts to bring those people in.

Again, I emphasize this point: recruitment and production are a key part of making online consultations work. They don't just happen accidentally, they happen as a result of a lot of effort to bring the right kinds of people into the right kinds of places in the discussion.

¿ (0955)

Mr. Jerry Pickard: It's a kind of similar management problem, and maybe it's just a matter of having resources to handle it. I have found a phenomenon in the last five years where I'll get almost pen pal people who will fire off an e-mail on everything and anything; it's a regular fifty hits so often and so on. The number of people who are doing that at this point in time is growing exponentially.

I appreciate them taking time to input, but it's becoming very.... I can pick up a newspaper, and often whatever is said in the newspaper is what these people are firing off. It's not necessarily relevant or new information, it's a response to every article they read in the newspaper.

It has become an entertainment vehicle: what do I send and what do I get back? It's an issue of some people being in isolation, possibly, and it's big time after retirement; they're looking for things to do. Now, I don't diminish the reality, but maybe there are problems here you've looked at where you've tried to come up with some idea.

I might suggest that if somebody in the government gave me 10 extra people, I could handle all this pretty easily.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: I think we're talking here about protocols. In any new communication medium, people are very confused about how to use it.

I'll give you an example if I may. In the late 1960s Britain established something you'd had in all parts of North America for quite a long time before that. We call them phone-in programs, and I think here you call them call-in programs, where people call in and talk to politicians. For the first year of phone-in programs in Britain, hundreds of people used to arrive at the radio studio in order to participate in these things because they didn't understand the concept that they could phone from home. They used to go to the lobby of the radio studio, ask to use the telephone, and then try to get through to the studio.

Now, the reason I give that example is because new media are complicated. People have to work out strategies for using them; they have to know what they can do.

In the early days of television there was a very widespread phenomenon, not just amongst mentally ill people, in which people would write to characters in television shows and tell them about their lives and want to talk to them, because this was a new phenomenon. Suddenly dramas were coming into people's living rooms and they were seeing these people on a daily basis. As television has evolved, that phenomenon has largely disappeared.

That's not particularly helpful in terms of your day-to-day work in here, but what I want to say is that it's a question of establishing those protocols so people actually know that it is not convenient or part of the norm of political communication to enter into a pen pal relationship with our elected representative. It's not manageable; it can't work.

That has to be explained to them, and in explaining it, one has to be able to offer something else. It seems to me that in the consultation environment, this is the something else. What you can say to them is, look, on the parliamentary website there is a consultation index; if you want to get involved in a consultation on a number of issues that concern you, sign up here; we'll tell you when those consultations are happening, and we'll tell you what's happened as a result of those consultations. You can have, as it were, this intimate relationship with the institution but not with me as a person because I am only one person.

It seems to me that those protocols are needed but that individual MPs can't do that on their own. You need a collective decision about how to do that.

À (1000)

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you.

Carolyn.

The Joint Chair (Mrs. Carolyn Bennett): As joint chair of this committee, I just want to ask a couple of questions about resources, which has come up a number of times. In some ways what we've done here is, in terms of OECD information, consultation, and deliberation, still only a little bit of one, a tiny bit of two, and nowhere near three for actual online deliberative, moderated consultation like you've done. What should we as this committee be asking for in terms of resources that would allow us to move forward, as you've said, practically, experimentally, and incrementally? I heard that part.

If you were going to help us go get the resources we need, what priorities should we be setting in terms of money and expertise for the kind of information website we have on the disability committee--which no other committee has--for developing the e-consultation process? That was really just a rudimentary kind of consultation, one that, as you know, had the three tools, and you'll see in a sec.

Also, there's the expertise within the Library of Parliament to be able to do this important piece in terms of the filtration, the analysis, and at some point the moderation. What do we need?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: First of all, if I may say so as an outsider, I think you should do it. You should continue with this process because, I am certain, this is what a modern parliament should be doing. I think you should also be proceeding to the deliberative stage of this, which you are probably not as far away from as you might think.

In terms of resources, I think there are three key parts of this. The first of them is the technology, and the technology, I think, is not a particularly expensive part. Now, in an ideal world one would like to have specially designed discussion software. There are much better ways of running online discussions than the ways we have used in the British Parliament, but the ways we have used have been adequate. One can achieve the necessary level of technology without any very clever or expensive gadgets.

The only way to make this expensive would be to go outside to a technology company and ask them how much it costs, in which case they would tell you that it's an enormously expensive thing, but I don't think it is.

I think the second part of this is about human resources, and that's to do with moderation. One of the key parts of this is to have two or three people who can be involved in, first of all, a pre-consultation stage of recruitment and outreach; second, a daily process of moderating the discussion, encouraging it, and summarizing it as it goes along; and third, writing up the report of the discussion after it has taken place. It seems to me one is looking there at a specific and well-trained group of people who are developing those kinds of skills.

Third--I would say this because I'm an academic--you need evaluation. I do think you have to build, particularly in the experimental stage, a lot of analysis into all this to actually see the answers to the kinds of things you've been asking today, what's actually happening, who's coming on, and so on.

I've been recently giving advice to the U.K. House of Commons on this question about how this becomes a routine part of parliamentary procedure, which they now want to do. My view is that there is a need for something like a public participation unit, a unit of three or four people whose job it is to think in terms of bringing the public in, particularly using these technologies but perhaps not only these technologies in order to do this. How do you get the public to sense that something is happening, to know about these things, and so on?

What would be unwise to do in this context, I think, would be to try to put any figures on this, because I don't know about the specific Canadian context. But I think those are the key resources: a minimal amount of technology, a lot of organizational and moderation skills, and evaluation.

My other piece of advice in that context would be that there is a need in a committee like this for a set of principles to be set out within which all of that can operate, that is, these are the kinds of things we want or don't want from this process.

À (1005)

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): We're going to a second round.

Can I ask you a practical question? How do the concerned citizens know of the process? You referred to violence and other issues. How do the citizens throughout the country become aware of this, given that they don't follow the parliamentary process that well? They don't know there's a....

Prof. Stephen Coleman: There are two ways and there could be a third. The two ways are through the use of traditional media. Local radio in particular has been very helpful in the U.K. in publicizing these consultations. The fact these are parliamentary consultations makes them something the media feel they should publicize and are happy to publicize. Indeed, because of the novelty of the use of the Internet, they feel there's a story there to publicize as well.

I have to warn you that many of you will find yourselves photographed endlessly standing in front of computers if you go down this road, because that is the only thing journalists seem to be able to think of when they're trying to cover this sort of story.

The second element is outreach work, usually with partner organizations. In the work we have done, for example, when we were dealing with domestic violence, we worked with an organization called Women's Aid, and they were able to get us into the network that exists and to tell us about the various people to talk to. Again, I think that is a very important thing to do, to recognize that one can never have all the network at one's own fingertips.

The third element, which the British Parliament didn't do for reasons I won't go into but one I would have thought would be sensible to do here, is to use the parliamentary website. One area of all parliaments the public does see, even if they see nothing else, is the parliamentary website. I would have thought one could use the parliamentary website to say, this is happening and do you want to become part of it? Apart from anything else, the medium is the message there. I would have thought it's a way of showing, through the website, that Parliament is an accessible place.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you very much.

Ms. Grey had a supplementary.

Miss Deborah Grey: I was going to ask some questions about budgeting, but that actually filled quite a bit of it just in response to Jerry.

I don't know if this is much help, but I found it a little bit helpful, anyway. I advertise in my householders and just say, I get many thousands of e-mails, so please identify yourself as a constituent. I'm amazed at the number of people who actually do respond to that, and they say, I am a constituent and here's my address; they prove it. But we're just completely overwhelmed with this, and thus the blessing/curse part of this, where you've given us all kinds of positive and negative things.

When on the human resource aspect you talk about maybe two or three people to do the beginning of it and three or four for evaluation, I think that is not unworkable. I think we could certainly move ahead in that area.

It's fascinating, because if we don't do it, then we're just going to playing catch-up all the time. This is a way of life now and that's all there is to it, so we need to move ourselves up into the 21st century.

Thank you.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: If I could just make one point, it occurs to me that if anyone asked me theoretically which country in the world ought to be doing this, it would be Canada because of the Internet access levels and because of the tradition of political participation here. There are a whole range of reasons the British Parliament shouldn't actually have been the first to have done this but happened to be so. Certainly, the Canadian Parliament could now push ahead in all kinds of interesting ways.

À (1010)

Miss Deborah Grey: In terms of participation and involvement as well, just our geography is purely frightening in those kinds of areas. For those of us who have served in rural constituencies, it's two and a half or three hours in a blizzard to drive to a town hall meeting. It would just be way easier to punch up online, wouldn't it?

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Senator Forrestall, you had a second question?

Senator Michael J. Forrestall (Dartmouth and the Eastern Shore, PC): I did. I appreciate the need to get on with the reality of the age. Now, I think of the United Kingdom and I think of a multiplicity of cultures and languages and whatnot. We are multicultural to a certain extent, and in a very definitive way we are a bilingual and bicultural country. To what degree in your experience is the nature of the language and the culture a danger?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: In a sense the Internet is quite good for bilingual communication because of the fact that the Internet allows for what is asynchronous communication. Contrary to what some people might think, the Internet is not a very fast medium; it slows things down. People send a message, they store a message, they retrieve it when they want to, and they can read a translation when they want to.

So it's not like television. It moves at a slower pace in many ways, and in that sense a bilingual environment for communication is probably easier there. But I have to say to you that you're fortunate in Canada having this kind of bilingual issue. I'm an advisor to the Welsh assembly, and my comment to you is, at least you're dealing with two living languages.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): We'll thank the professor, and then we will move to the next part of our session.

Carolyn, would you thank the professor.

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett): I will, and before I thank you, I would love to figure out how we can continue to use you to help us push the liaison committee to get us the resources we need.

Our experience in putting up an information site for one committee was that it was hugely costly for us just to make the work of the committee and everything available to people online; that doesn't somehow happen by magic.

I want to take this opportunity also to thank the library and the House of Commons for doing our tiny little experiment, because we know what kinds of person-hours got put into that one site.

Do you have anything to say?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: What I would say is that I have an institute at the University of Oxford that is there to work on this kind of research, and if I can be of any use in the work you're doing, I am more than happy to volunteer that service. Just let us pursue this, and if there are useful things I can do to help to make things happen here, I'd like to contribute that.

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett): But you will just prescribe for us that every committee should at least have an information site, shouldn't they?

Prof. Stephen Coleman: Yes.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett): Thank you. That's on the record.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: That was an easy question.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): That's a planted message.

The Joint Chair (Ms. Carolyn Bennett): I just want to say, as the committee probably now realizes, when we first started thinking about these things, all roads led to Stephen Coleman in terms of the people actually doing work on renovating Parliament into the 21st century, making it relevant and responsive.

Actually, I think it's spectacular, the work he did not only at the Hansard Society, but also at Westminster, at the LSE, and now with his serious bully pulpit at Oxford. It's spectacular, and we hope we will continue to learn from you after this beginning of a relationship.

I can't thank you enough for making time in your extraordinarily busy schedule over these last few days, so thank you very much, Stephen.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: Thank you for having me.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): The next part of our session is a presentation by staff from the Library of Parliament, Mr. Young, Mr. Niemczak, and Mr. Peters. Mr. Young will be giving the presentation. He is the acting director of Political and Social Affairs in the Library of Parliament.

There will be a 15-minute presentation and then questions afterwards.

À (1015)

Mr. William Young (Acting Director, Political and Social Affairs Division, Library of Parliament): Professor Coleman is a tough act to follow.

In preparing the presentation but also with the e-consultation we carried out for the Subcommittee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities, we were able to benefit from his experience as well as from the experience of the Romanow Commission. What we tried to do was incorporate into what we did a sum of the lessons learned he described to you.

I know how I was billed, but I'm really here as the researcher for the Subcommittee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities. That means a lot of things. Among other things, I remembered to wear matching socks this morning, but my usual job is sitting beside the chair and--what shall I say--I'm not quite as comfortable sitting at this end of the table.

I'm very fortunate today to have with me people from the Parliamentary Research Branch, and I think they represents a huge cross-section of the talent you have available to you. To my right is Peter Niemczak, who's a research assistant in the Law and Government Division. In doing this project he became everybody's right-hand guy. He was able to make the links between the technology research, committee work, and parliamentary activities, which I think are critical in making any project like this a success.

On my left is Joe Peters, and he adopted us or we adopted him, I don't quite know which to say. He came to us from the Romanow Commission, where he was the person who set up the e-consultation, which was probably the largest-scale e-consultation that's been conducted in Canada. We're very fortunate that we were able to have him to advise and console us.

Over here is Megan Furi, the intern who's been with us for a year in the Political and Social Affairs Division. Today she's the clicker, but actually what she did was assemble and analyze all the material that came in to the subcommittee during this process on the Internet to make sure it met the criteria we had established for posting.

So you have a little bit of a cross-section here, but I would also like to emphasize that this project consumed the time and employed the talents of a huge number of people in both the House of Commons and the Library of Parliament.

The motivation for the study began driven and remained driven by the Subcommittee on the Status of Persons With Disabilities, particularly by Carolyn Bennett, who is the chair. Actually, she should be sitting here with us, not up there with you folks.

I'll never forget, actually, the origination of this. It happened in a basement room in the Centre Block, where Carolyn met with the senior officials of the House and the library and said, I want a Volkswagen, not a Cadillac, but I want to do this. I think she got a Buick, actually, but Carolyn started to outline her vision.

Collectively, the people in the House and the library, the senior managers and those of us who ended up doing this, felt a little like Alice in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. We were sort of saying “There's no use trying,” said Alice, “one can't believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” Carolyn as the White Queen replied. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

So we didn't have much of a choice. If you ever hear me muttering about the White Queen, you'll know Carolyn wants something impossible and she either got up early or ate breakfast late.

The project is a continuation of the traditional role of the parliamentary committees using a different medium. The one thing we tried to do that I think goes beyond what Professor Coleman was talking to you about was to integrate the e-consultation into the traditional committee studies. What we did was, we set up a subject, Canada Pension Plan disability. We had briefings from the department in the traditional way. We had a round table where we brought together all the possible and potential stakeholders to outline the issues. Then we put up the information-based website, which I'll show you shortly. Then we began the e-consultation.

À (1020)

But the e-consultation proceeded in conjunction with regular committee hearings with the “usual suspects”, as we call them, the policy experts and the NGOs, national organizations of various interested groups--stakeholders, if you like. We tried to ensure the two went in tandem in one sense. We used the round table to validate the issues for both the e-consultation and the traditional study.

One other thing I think that's important to say is that the whole exercise is content-driven.

The next point is the partnership. I think what we were able to achieve could only have been achieved by a partnership. What we had in our partnership were the subcommittee and the committee's directorate, including the House of Commons, who provided a clerk who was interested and keen to assist the Parliamentary Research Branch of the Library of Parliament.

The researcher was me, but I had access to the full range of services plus the Information Services Directorate and the technology people. This was conceived as a pilot, so we were all a little bit more willing to bend the rules and to try to make it succeed. I don't know; you might want to ask some questions about the partnership.

Professor Coleman talked about formalized rules, and we had formalized rules. We sat down and worked out a project charter that set out the scope of the e-consultation and was very similar to the work plan of the subcommittee for its traditional hearings, but it married the two.

It was a little bit like a prenuptial agreement. The partners, with the exception of the politicians, sat down and discussed exactly what each of them was going to do, how they were going to do it, and when they were going to do it. As with any good prenuptial agreement, we fought and argued and compromised, but ultimately it was forgotten once we had signed it, as it would be in any good marriage. It became something that was taken for granted, and I think that was critical.

In addition, we asked the chair to sign the project charter. It was given to the members of the subcommittee so all of them could see it and comment, question, or whatever. They were kept fully briefed throughout this process.

Again, I can't overemphasize the fact that we were able to use Joe's talents throughout this project. Within the library we mobilized the resources we required from the Parliamentary Research Branch--“mobilized” is probably too strong a word; it's more like begged, borrowed, and stole.

We had willing cooperation from the Operational Services division and from the Information and Documentation Branch, which meant that we had access to the skills of the web publishers in Operational Services and the librarians in IDB.

Now, on the implementation of phase one, this is something Professor Coleman, in my view, may not have talked about enough in his presentation. What we did was, first we put up an information-based website six months before we actually began the e-consultation. The website is content-driven; it contains analyses of the issues that had been identified in the round table and in the committee's hearings previously. It also brings together subcommittee documents such as briefs, evidence, schedules, and members' biographies.

I should mention that we were given permission to have our own web address, which meant that the public could get at this site without going through the 47 clicks that are required to get through to any of the other committee websites. So we had our web address, www.parl.gc.ca/disability. It provided easy access for the public.

I'm going to ask Peter to talk a little bit about the site.

À (1025)

Mr. Peter Niemczak (Research Assistant, Library of Parliament): Thanks.

I'm like Bill; I also think that an information-based site is absolutely essential for successful e-consultation. When we did our information-based site, we set up four major areas where there was information: the Our Issues section, the Our Work section, About Us, and the FAQ.

In the Our Issues section we prepared at the research branch--when I say “we”, I should say, largely Bill--prepared several background papers on CPP-D and some of the past work of the disability subcommittee on that issue. We prepared an FAQ and a list of annotated links.

These papers we prepared are fairly similar to the traditional research branch papers we're all familiar with. But because we're using the Internet, we've had to rewrite and reorganize these papers because we're using a different medium and we're addressing a different audience. There's a lot of extra work involved in that.

Some of the issue papers Bill prepared were the policy overview, and Kevin Kerr prepared a statistical overview. We also prepared one that looked at the administrative issues.

The annotated links were something we put into this section that allowed users to further explore some of the disability issues and use this site to go on and dig further into an issue if they wanted to.

The Our Work section of the website had elements you'd find in a traditional committee website. This had transcripts, minutes, schedules of meetings, and committee reports, and we supplemented the information that's in the Our Work section by adding something new, the briefs the committee received from witnesses who appeared at the traditional hearings.

The About Us section provided information about the members, the committee, and its work. This portion of the site also repackages some of the library content that can be found on the parliamentary website, particularly the biographies, which in an e-consultation allows the users to build a bit of a relationship with the members. It's not a personal relationship, but they can see a member's picture and they know what they've done in the past, so it starts to build that one-on-one relationship.

In this section we also had a series of background papers Bill had prepared, maybe with some help from Kevin, that explained to the public the mandate of the committee and also some of the history of the committee; it also explained what the committee had done in the past. Again, these were pretty extensive background papers we had to rework and rewrite for this website.

The last major information section on the website is the FAQ, short for “frequently asked questions”. This provided users who aren't really familiar with the parliamentary setting or with the CPP-D issue a chance to go to the website and find out what exactly a parliament, a session, or a committee is.

When you look at our site statistics for the e-consultation, it's amazing how many people actually used the FAQ. I think 10% of the visitors to the site for December, January, and February went to the FAQs, and that's a pretty big load.

The last thing I want to say is, there are several other administrative elements on the site, including the Contact Us section, which helped users contact the committee in an organized fashion through the clerk, and a site map to help guide people through the site. We had a really neat little tool called Join Our News List, which allowed people to sign up to receive a short newsletter once a month--but no more than once a month because I had to write it.

That was basically our information-based site, and I think I'll pass it back.

À (1030)

Mr. William Young: The one thing I would add here, though, is that we were very careful to distinguish what Parliament was doing from what the government was doing. A lot of the information on the site was actually geared towards distinguishing between the parliamentary study of the Canada Pension Plan and the Canada Pension Plan administration or the appeal and application procedure for it. Wherever relevant, the distinction between Parliament and government was built into all the information on the site.

The second phase was the implementation of the e-consultation itself. This took a long time. In part due to the prorogation of Parliament, things got delayed, but in the long run I think it was good because the planning for this consumed a huge amount of time. This, you can see, is the file of planning documents only for the e-consultation.

The website used three tools, and I'm going to ask Joe to talk about those tools. It was launched on December 3, 2002, the International Day of Disabled Persons, and ran until March 3, 2003.

Mr. Joe Peters (Consultant, Library of Parliament): Thanks, Bill, Peter.

You'll see that what we did was quite similar to the approach that was taken by the Romanow Commission in the sense that we started with some fact-finding and an information-based site, starting the relationship with Canadians partly through the news list mechanism. We had about 400 people who were interested in what was going on with the committee before we even started the consultations. What that allowed us to do was, we had a captive audience to start the consultation phase.

We developed three tools, which we launched on December 3. They're a little bit different from the approach Dr. Coleman discussed in the sense that it wasn't deliberation or discussion amongst different Canadians, but it was a one-to-one relationship between Canadians and the committee. There was a deliberation that happened, but it wasn't a deliberation amongst their peers.

The first tool we had was what we called our issue poll--no insult to Dr. Fishkin, who is the creator of deliberative polling techniques. What we ended up doing was moving beyond the traditional surveys you would have from market research firms and describing the issues, describing the pros and cons of different actions, and then asking people to consider options once they'd had a chance to review that. So they had a personal deliberation in the sense that they had to work through issues, work through options, and then answer some questions after they had had a chance to work through that.

That was one approach we had. We ended up having, I think, over 1,300 Canadians participate in that process.

The neat thing about that as well is that we were able to tell the perspective of the person who was participating. We asked them, are you a person with disabilities? Are you currently a family member? Are you a member of the medical community? At the end of the day we could then look and do detailed analysis on the results people had presented but also see what the results were, based on their perspective and experience with the system.

The second tool we had was Share Your Story. Primarily, people in the disability community were able to come here and tell their story about their experience with the Canada Pension Plan disability program, and they are excellent stories. All of them gave extremely valuable insight into the process and some of them were very heart-touching. Just to hear the challenges and problems of dealing with income support programs in Canada was very valuable in the analysis component.

And then the third part was Present Your Solutions, which was a more structured piece. It allowed people, those who wanted to provide detailed input into a series of issues we had identified, to actually write and upload a document. Then we'd have that entered in a way similar to how you would handle a brief that is presented to a committee.

What those three different techniques allowed us to do was first, provide a structured way for people to work through some of the issues and understand some of the issues the committee was facing. Another way was for them to share their story, and people had the opportunity to either share their story with the committee only or to share their story by having it published on the website. Those stories are still up there today. The third was to present your solution to provide the policy experts--or the usual suspects--as well as other Canadians with detailed information on solutions to some of the problems.

In the end it provided us with a really good balance of approaches and inputs that allowed people to choose. They could do one, two, or all three if they were interested. We learned, based on our experience with the Romanow Commission and with other consultation techniques, that it was extremely valuable having these all at the same time and allowing people to pick the way they wanted to contribute to the subcommittee's work.

One of the criticisms we received with the Romanow Commission when we were doing our online consultation was, we had only one tool available at one time and didn't give a choice. They had to do it one way and there was really no other way. So we integrated a couple of different options for people to participate in the way they felt was best for them.

À (1035)

Mr. William Young: The one thing I would add here is that people were encouraged to register, so we had their e-mail addresses, but they were allowed to participate anonymously. They were also allowed to have their stories either posted or not posted, only given to the subcommittee. However, all the information received was used in the analysis of the documentation.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Were the stories and solutions anonymous? I know the polling was.

Mr. William Young: Some were and some were not. That was the choice of the individual who submitted.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): So the polling was 100% anonymous?

Mr. William Young: No. Everyone had to register. They had a choice for the poll, and they had a choice for the solutions and the stories as well.

Mr. Joe Peters: It was because some people felt reluctant to share their personal information. If they didn't want to do that and attach their name to it, then we didn't want to oblige them to do so. They had the option of registering or doing it anonymously.

Mr. William Young: We went through quite a detailed process of identifying how we would handle this, respecting individuals' privacy and at the same time not putting abusive or inappropriate material on the site.

Now, I'll just give you a sense of the evaluation techniques. We are evaluating this from the perspective of the participants. I'll give you some of the site statistics, and we are doing an internal evaluation as well.

The participant evaluation for the issue poll shows that about 93% of the people who finished the poll would do it again, so people responded very positively to the issue poll. Only 2.5% of the people who completed the poll said they wouldn't do it again.

Another way we have tried to deal with this is consultation interest. We had 1,450 people respond to the issue poll; our target was 200. We had 135 stories; our target was 40. For solutions we were looking for 10 and we got 28. The one group who we were hoping might respond more than they actually did and where we did not meet the target was doctors.

In terms of site statistics, you can see the number of page requests mounting throughout the e-consultation period, so during the e-consultation period we had over 169,000 requests and the number of users went from about 3,300 up to 15,000, almost 16,000 people.

Mr. Peter Niemczak: I'll just put those statistics into perspective. For the same time last year, for the committee's website before the information-based site, the committee had about 1,400 or 1,500 hits on the site; that was it. It's gone from 1,400 to 170,000.

Mr. William Young: And the interesting piece is that even now the e-consultation has ended, people are still coming back to the committee site, if you'll look at the last figure. That's only for two months, as well, and it's almost 30,000.

Now, from our perspective as researchers working for the Parliamentary Research Branch, the other thing we found interesting was where people went. Our content attracted and continues to attract the most interest on the site, even more than the e-consultation components. The site in itself has become a resource for Canadians in terms of finding out about both what the committee is doing and what Parliament is up to.

The key factors for success; I have identified some of them here. The balance are in the evaluation. We are doing a formal evaluation. All the partners are involved in this and it will be prepared shortly. It's still ongoing.

The key factors, ongoing and active political support, I think I have spoken about.

Tying the online component to the traditional offline study; this was a little complicated, but I think that ultimately what it has meant is that the study of CPP-D and the recommendations are going to be much stronger.

To tell you the truth, what the analysis has shown is that the experts' testimony is perhaps a little more sophisticated but not basically different from the recommendations Canadians were providing to us through the e-consultation. Instead of reaching the hundred-odd witnesses who might come before a committee on this study, we have managed to reach about two thousand people.

For bringing all the relevant partners together at the outset, the planning component was key. Adequate time for planning and the appropriate first steps I have spoken about.

Picking the proper tools, I think, was also key.

Communications--which we aren't going to have enough time to speak about but you may want to ask about in your questions--were essential. The analysis is ongoing.

There are two other things. The organizational support we all received from the House of Commons and the Library of Parliament from the senior managers meant that we felt quite secure in proceeding with this.

Then the final key factor for success was, I think, just plain blind luck.

Thank you very much.

À (1040)

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you very much, and thank you for an extremely interesting presentation.

Having the expert here, we might as well use him for a bit of evaluation, so I would ask Professor Coleman for his comments before we go any further. Would you come to the table and maybe give us your comments, and then I'll open it up for questions.

Prof. Stephen Coleman: Well, I think these are the experts on this one. I think this was a really good piece of experimentation, where you did all the things that should be done. The information element was a really important one, and it was right that there were a number of options for participation.

I would like to see a more deliberative element in future experiments, but I think this was, as was stated, a start.

I would have a minor quibble about one point. I'm surprised that not all the stories and the solutions were put up on the website. I think the essence of this kind of medium is about transparency, and unless somebody says something that is manifestly libellous, I can't see a reason for not putting it up there. That was an editorial decision I would change.

But on the whole, I think this is exactly the right kind of initial approach to testing this and taking it further, and you should undoubtedly do more of it.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you very much.

Ms. Grey.

Miss Deborah Grey: Thank you again.

This just looks like a huge piece of work. As a parliamentarian, I'm just embarrassed to say I didn't know any of this was going on. I'm probably pretty typical, but with all the stuff that comes across our desks.... I kind of pay attention to some of this, and it's just unbelievable that we simply can't keep up with what's going on, so it was really good.

Again, let me ask, was it a three-month trial? It seems to me that if you worked this hard at it, you should have kept this thing going for a while. Is there a reason why you didn't?

Mr. William Young: Well, we have to report to the House, and now we're trying to report to you.

Miss Deborah Grey: Oh, sure, but the House is always here. It never goes away.

Mr. William Young: In large part, the parliamentary calender played a huge role, as did the committee's wish to prepare a report and try to table a report this June.

Miss Deborah Grey: So in the fall, then, will you take another kick at it? Like, why not?

À (1045)

Mr. William Young: It depends on the political will and the political decisions.

Miss Deborah Grey: I see.

Well, if we're speaking of political will, then, you have all this wonderful stuff, and I don't want to sound cynical, but is anything going to change in terms of public policy and legislation to help these people? I wish Carolyn were here, because she and I both experience this unbelievable frustration what with constituents coming into our office and this probably being one of the most disastrous programs there is. We just feel helpless.

So this is cool, but what's going to become of it?

Mr. William Young: I think it's already basically having an impact. I was e-mailed a test site from Canada Pension Plan, who've used our model in one sense to simplify their own e-communication, as it were. We'll see.

It was a pretty collaborative effort, and actually, the final chapter will be written next week. What we've done is, we're bringing in some of the participants from the e-consultation, we've identified some of the stories and solutions that were extremely valuable, and we're putting them, along with the recommendations that came out of the e-consultations, on the table for the Department of Finance and the department.

In one sense, we're testing Canadians' recommendations against the department, and it will be interesting to see. I sensed throughout this a considerable willingness to change and think about things.

The insurance industry, for example, were actively encouraging their people to go through this site and to read the information. We got 82 people coming to this who identified themselves as being from the insurance industry. We noticed--personally, I'm speaking as a researcher--a slight change in the attitude of some who had previously had more confrontational positions.

Mr. Joe Peters: Three months allowed us to have a sort of momentum of interest be created. One of the tools we had but didn't really talk about was the E-mail to a Friend section, which is really almost like a virus technique in the sense that once someone completed it, they could send it off to people they thought should also complete it as well.

That two- or three-month timeframe is really generally considered the appropriate time to allow enough people to participate and to contribute to--

Miss Deborah Grey: With the Romanow Commission, did you see a gradual growth in interest or hits, was it exponential, or how did it go?

Mr. Joe Peters: It was absolutely phenomenal. We anticipated having about 2,500 people participate in the workbook we designed for them, which was very similar to the issue poll. In the first week we had 4,500 people who had completed it, so there was a humungous spike in the initial phase and then it sort of tailed down. It ran for about three and a half months as well.

There were different spikes, and you would see them happen around periods like when there were town halls, because they were publicizing at the different town halls that you could do this workbook as well. So there'd be little spikes along the way, but there was a tremendous amount of interest at the beginning.

That was also facilitated by the fact that we had people who went to the information-based version of the Romanow site, signed up to the news list, and said, let me know about the consultation activities. When we started this, once again, we probably had about a thousand people who said, I want to participate in the ongoing consultations.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you.

Senator Forrestall.

Senator Michael J. Forrestall: How interdenominational is this plan? Is the structural process you've outlined here applicable to most of our committees?

Mr. William Young: It depends on the issue. I think the information-based site--

Senator Michael J. Forrestall: That's a good observation. Is it issue-driven or committee-driven?

Mr. William Young: This has been content-driven all the way through. For something like pre-budget consultations or for something like the current justice committee's study of same-sex marriage, it's not a one-size-fits-all deal.

I think Professor Coleman said it; it's an ongoing process of experimentation and adaptation. Is it directly applicable as it stands? No. Have we built the capacity within the House of Commons and the Parliamentary Research Branch to do this kind of thing and at least ask the right questions? Yes.

Senator Michael J. Forrestall: What did it cost?

Mr. William Young: That's a good question. We had contracts with Joe where he guided us through the process. For him and his firm the three contracts would be about $230,000.

Internally, it's very difficult to know. What I asked them to do was to provide me with an assessment of the amount of time it took for each phase. That time was considerable. In terms of the research branch, it was for the development of the information-based site. I will give it to you in hours: 643 hours, about one-third of a full-time equivalent. For the e-consultation site development it was about 885 hours. The e-consultation itself, because of the technology component, was about 290 hours. So far the analysis portion has been about 265 hours.

À (1050)

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you very much.

I'll ask Mr. Telegdi to ask the final question, because the room will have to be evacuated here.

Mr. Andrew Telegdi: Thank you very much.

Once the website has been set up and the resources spent on it, it would seem to me that the costs of maintaining the website would be fairly small.

I'm wondering this in terms of the whole issue of e-government. We have departments and of course they have their websites. I wonder if it would be useful for Parliament in conjunction with the Auditor General to have their website. The reason I say that is, a lot of times things surface we should have heard about much sooner than we actually end up doing.

Would this be some kind of quality control on the departments if Parliament itself had this kind of tool so it could monitor?

Mr. William Young: You're talking about the information-based site. The one thing I would say is that the upkeep of the site, while it's to some extent easy once it's put in place, still involves a fair amount of work because information becomes available and documents have to be rewritten.

The one thing we tried to do was to make sure we didn't compromise the role of parliamentarians. The information that's on the site is what we would potentially give you as background information, but things like briefing notes, which have all those indiscreet questions we like to put in, we kept just for you. We did not put that on the site.

In terms of consultation and checks on departments, departments have basically developed a cottage industry in consultation. I think that's one of the reasons Parliament should probably consider doing more of this, because otherwise you're going to be presented with baked cakes, as it were.

The Joint Chair (Senator Yves Morin): Thank you.

I think we'll have to break off because of another committee at 11.

Thank you very much, Professor Coleman, Mr. Young, Mr. Niemczak, and Mr. Peters. It's been extremely informative.