Hon. Grant Mitchell:

 

Honourable senators, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak for a few minutes about technology and its use in the chamber and in our daily work. Technology allows us to be more economical and more efficient.

Honourable senators, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss the question of the use of technology, and there is an implication for that with respect to libraries, so I thought I would use this report as the reason for making some of these points.

I do this in the context of what I believe to be some excellent progress amongst our colleagues and the administration as we edge our way into the 21st century of modern technology. More and more we are beginning to see real progress. Just last week we saw the official kick-off of some new websites for committees. I have looked at those and I am very impressed and very pleased with the look of them and their utility. Of course, more work needs to be done with respect to a number of items with the possibility, for example, of being able to reference material easily and quickly in Hansard and so on, but it is a very positive step.

We have been given permission to utilize our budgets to buy tablets. We have some great pioneers of that. Senator Finley bought a tablet himself. He probably lined up to get it the first day they came out. He swears by them. I have bought one, as have others, and more and more are buying them.

There is more and more website usage by senators. I recently looked at an electronic newsletter on the website of Senator Wallin. It is an excellent newsletter, very detailed, informative and engaging. All of this is exceptional.

The Senate has announced that it is tweeting. I do not quite know how that works, but it sounds and looks impressive. Under the leadership and guidance of Senator Angus, the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources took the initiative of creating a special stand-alone website for our report on a Canadian energy strategy in order to highlight that in the minds of Canadians and give them the chance to see what we are doing and, more important, to give them the chance to tell us what we should be doing and to respond and react to what we are doing. That is very positive.

Also, because our communications person, Ceri Au, announced on Twitter the one-year anniversary of that website, we were retweeted by Kady O'Malley, who has 15,000 followers, so now many more Canadians are aware of how cutting-edge the Senate is, particularly Senator Angus' Committee on Energy and the Environment. This is all very good.

I want to encourage that and congratulate the staff and senators who have been pushing that and have created the environment within which we can make this kind of progress.

The Speaker is looking at me sideways and wondering if I will ever get to libraries. As a matter of fact, I will. There are implication for libraries in the context of technology.

Our library is one of the most remarkable in the country and probably in the world. It is one of the most beautiful institutions in the country and certainly in the world. It provides excellent support, information and data management for us and the other place in our work. However, it does not provide us with electronic books. Imagine if we could borrow a book electronically on our iPad, PowerBook or Playbook. Imagine the advantages of that. First, it is just more convenient.

I know that there are people who have a romantic notion of books, paper and newspapers. I do not. I love to read my books on an electronic facility like an iPad or a Kindle. I do not want to emphasize one particular brand, but you know what I mean.

It is exceptionally convenient, when you travel as much as we do, to have 50 or 60 books in one place, as well as to be able to buy a book if you are sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off. Of course you cannot be rolling; they will not let you look.

For example, I was travelling one day with Senator Dallaire. We were sitting on the tarmac for some time waiting to take off, and I looked at him and said, "You know, Roméo, I haven't bought your book yet," and I said, "I'm going to do that right now." I called Kindle, bought the book and he said, "Am I on Kindle?" He had no idea that he was digital, but the fact is that it is very convenient.

It also is much cheaper to buy books electronically than it is to buy hardcover or even paperback books. Generally, the electronic book is at a discount. It is also much easier for a library to deliver the book. Sometimes I will ask for a book from the Library of Parliament, they will have two copies and I will wait months until those copies come available as they go down the list. With electronic bookings, I believe they are infinite. I do not think it is a huge problem to get an electronic book. In fact you do not even have to bother with someone to walk it over or deliver it. I think you can just press a button and it appears.

People will ask: How do you get rid of it? What if I get it and keep it? The fact of the matter is, amazingly, these books evaporate after a certain period of time, whatever the borrowing period would be. The same thing happens with movies. You rent a movie, you have 30 days to look at it and 48 hours after you start looking at it, and then it just evaporates magically.

I will list some of the advantages we would have if our Library of Parliament could provide us with digital books. We would save money. I am being selfish in this but it would be much more convenient to travel because you have this device instead of umpteen books in your briefcase. It would be far more efficient and reduce pressure on staff. Delivery staff could be used in other more productive ways, more interesting ways. Did I say it would save money? Let me say that again: It would save money.

It would be very good if the Library of Parliament could look at that idea. I did mention the suggestion to a senior member of the Library of Parliament about a year ago, and immediately, it seemed to me, there was a negative response — cannot do that, there would be copyright issues and there would be this issue and that issue. No, there would not be. We are already doing it in the Edmonton Public Library. We can borrow music, and borrow videos so we can certainly loan books digitally out of the Library of Parliament.

Our Library of Parliament is a world-class institution and can provide unbelievable leadership. I would like to hear them saying that they will show the rest of this country and the rest of the world how to bring borrowing and lending practices into the 21st century and achieve all of those advantages that I have listed. I will not list them again. Honourable senators, that is what the Library of Parliament could do.

Speaking of saving money by going electronic the Library of Parliament provides us all kinds of data, papers and briefing notes for committees. We could have all of that on iPad or Playbook, absolutely. In fact, this summer a friend of mine sent me an article about how the Virginia State Senate, 44 of them, have all been given iPads. They get all of their briefings for committees — and believe it or not they pass hundreds and hundreds of bills in a session — and now they are getting major amounts of what was paper, for their sittings as well on their iPads.

To look at the volume of paper we have, honourable senators need only look under their desks. This is what I have accumulated in not a very long period of time. We have the Debates, Orders of the Day, Journals and bills. All of that is somewhere in the ether, or somewhere on some server, and it can all be put right into this iPad automatically. In fact, we can get some of it right now but it is just not very convenient.

The Virginia State Senate has a program to package a briefing book. You press a button, you press the screen, it opens and you just turn pages like any book. It is extremely efficient. If they make a mistake on a page, they just re-send. They do not even have to bother you. You do not have to staple it, you do not have to print it, you do not have to deliver it, you do not have to three-hole punch it, and you do not have to bang your knees on it every time you get to your desk. Even I have banged them and I am short. You have nothing but convenience and advantage.

Here we are trying to save money in the Senate. We are going to cut our travel and we do not think we have enough money to televise the Senate. We could save thousands upon thousands of dollars if we just got a program, and it exists, that would transfer data, briefing notes and all of this kind of paper that we receive, in a secure and efficient way.

Tablets are also being used — and I have not read extensively about it — in the Dutch legislature. For those of us who believe in free markets, it is also being used extensively in the private sector. I talked to a major corporation in Calgary that is doing this very thing for their board of directors. They have about 20 directors and they save $60,000 a year because their directors now have a tablet, and they get all of their material on that tablet.

Honourable senators, I draw this matter to your attention. This is again an area where we could be the cutting edge. Instead of people thinking we are kind of slow and tired, they would be coming to us and asking, "How did you do this?" We would be getting all kinds of coverage about how we modernized this great institution in an efficient way and saved money doing it. I am not talking pennies; I am talking thousands upon thousands of dollars. It will probably save on staff — not that I want to lay anyone off — but for sure we would be able to get staff doing more interesting things, and more productive things for the money that we pay them.

I also want to say that I raised this issue with Senator Stewart Olsen, who responded very favourably. I believe she is heading up a reduced paper initiative, and I think she has asked some staff to consider this as a possibility. This is not rocket science, believe it or not anymore; this can be done in about 15 seconds and I think we should, probably by the end of next week.

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