MP's voting record should hold them accountable

It is among the most fundamental pieces of information in a democracy: the record of how an elected representative votes on behalf of constituents.

But most Canadians would struggle to find a list showing how their MPs voted on legislation before the House of Commons, so buried are these data in confusing parliamentary records.

Voting records for elected representatives in other countries are readily available on the Internet. The votes in the U.S. Congress are listed on the House of Representatives website and there are numerous public-interest groups that chart online the voting records of American politicians.

One can see, for instance, that Democratic presidential candidate and Illinois senator Barack Obama missed 37.4 per cent of recorded votes in the U.S. Senate, and voted in line with Democrats 96.7 per cent of the time.

But there is no official publication that lists the voting records for Canada's 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 voted on any given bill or motion, readers must navigate through the www.parl.gc.ca website and, by cross-referencing with an index, find the journal for the day of the vote, then scan through it for the rollcall 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.

A Canwest News Service story this week revealed Liberal MPs have on average participated in only 64 per cent of the votes in the House this session, a rate less than the turnout in the last federal election.

Liberals aren't showing up for votes, and when they do vote, they vote with the Conservatives 60% of the time, compared to only 26% of the time for the NDP.

There is a privately run website tried to fill this information gap by collating all the voting results for MPs.

Web developer Cory Horner, of Victoria, B.C., created howdtheyvote.ca three years ago because he was frustrated by the process required to find voting records online, however it is lacking in current stats as it is hard to keep up updating the site.

If MP's knew their constituents were likely to be presented with this information during an election, it causes them to think twice - in a positive sense. Hopefully, the voters would use the information to help decide whom they really want representing them in Ottawa.

We should all keep these facts in mind the next time the Liberals try to tell voters that only a 'Liberal' vote can stop Stephen Harper in Saskatchewan: 'Why vote for Liberals who--even if they show up--are more likely than not to vote with Stephen Harper?'