As an advocate for openness, I had an idea to make a project out of the government of Canada’s Open Data initiative to take a look at how my local MP voted on various pieces of legislation. It turns out though that this was not necessary due to how easy it was to find this information on the government’s own website. In this article, I will explain how you can do the same.

1. Find Your Representative

The first step in this process is to find who your representative is. To do so, go to the government’s own website ourcommons.ca’s search tool.

Simply type in your postal code in the search box to find out who your MP is.

2. Their Voting Record

Every MP’s voting record is public knowledge, and it is available nice and simple in a table on that MP’s page. For example, this is a link to Pierre Poilievre’s voting record.

To find your MP’s voting record, do step one, then: After the Overview, and Seat in The House sections, there are three tabs, Roles, Work, and Contact. Click on work. At the bottom of that tab is a link which says Chamber Votes. This will open a small window with some recent votes by this politician. If you want to see all their votes, there is a button at the bottom named All Votes by This Member.

Tada! You can now keep your local MP accountable for anything you do or do not support.

3. Bill Details

If you want to get into the nitty gritty, once you open a specific bill, you can actually find out the status of said bill, or read the actual text by clicking the View this Bill on LEGISinfo button.

Both the status of the bill, and a link to a PDF document containing the bilingual text of the bill are visible in the main body of the page.

Conclusion

I thought this was pretty cool! It was way simpler than I thought it would be.

Thanks, Canada!