It seems I may have been a tad optimistic about using MPs’ voting records against them. According to today’s Ottawa Citizen, the voting records of our MPs don’t actually exist — or, at least, not in an easily usable form.

There is no official publication that lists the voting records for Canadian MPs. The results of recorded votes in the House of Commons are buried in Hansard, the transcript of the debates, and the House journals, and these do not list votes by MP.

To find out how an MP cast a vote on any given bill or motion, readers must delve into the www.parl.gc.ca website.

By cross-referencing with an index, you can find the journal for the day of the vote, then scan through it for the roll call listing the yeas and nays recorded.

For those not familiar with parliamentary procedure, the records can be confusing. The journals list only the results of each vote and do not aggregate the results to see how any one MP voted on different bills or motions.

Of course, you might think that somebody on the Internet may have addressed this problem, and sure enough someone did: Cory Horner of howdtheyvote.ca. The trouble is, the website hasn’t been updated in a long time because the process of data collection and analysis is very labour-intensive.

So why isn’t the House of Commons providing this sort of information on its own? According to its spokeswoman, it’s because that sort of information belongs “in the political world” — in other words, the recorded vote isn’t an aspect of an MP’s job so much as it’s an aspect of an incumbent politician’s profile of work while in office. And House of Commons staff do try to be as non-political as possible.

The party websites? Well, it’s a double-edged sword: an MP can brag about the way he voted on one issue, but at the same time he can be smacked for the way he voted on a different issue. So if an MP’s record gets publicized by his own staff, of necessity it’s going to be an incomplete record.

Compiling an MP’s voting record does sound like a good project for a political blog, though. I think I may try something like that on the MP in my riding, Paul Dewar of the NDP, using the Ottawa Citizen’s methodology, and see what shows up. (Not sure how long it would take me, of course, so if I start the project I won’t be posting the results right away.)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 16:16 and is filed under Parliament, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.