Thursday, May 14, 2009

How's your Member of Parliament's attendance?

Good Day Readers:

After reading the the CTV article we decided to check on our Member's voting record. Here's what we found.

Between February 5, 2009 and May 5, 2009 they participated in 31 votes. The names shown for the Bills are their short titles:

Bill C-2 Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act: 4 Yeas; 1 Nay
Bill C-9 Canada Marine Act: 1 Yea; 1 Nay
Bill C-10 Budget Implementation Act: 4 Yeas; 7 Nays
Bill C-11 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act: 2 Yeas
Bill C-12 Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act: 3 Yeas
Bill C-21 Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act: 3 Yeas
Bill C-22 Act to amend the Criminal Act (animal cruelty): 3 Yeas
Bill C-24 Postal Services Continuation Act, 1997: 1 Yea

From this it appears their attendance was pretty good. We were starting to worry a little because they were seated within camera range of the Prime Minister during Question Period in the House then suddenly - Poof! - they were gone. Must have been given a new seat.

Why not add voting profiles and attendance records to the Parliamentary Reports Members distribute to constituents rather than the current puffery?

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk
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MPs' attendance records could become public
May. 13 2009
CTV.ca News Staff

Attendance records of Members of Parliament could be put on pubic display if a parliamentary committee decides it's needed to keep them at work.

The committee of procedure and House affairs decided on May 11 to study the parliamentary attendance rules because of growing concerns that some MPs may be playing hooky.

Under parliamentary rules, MPs are allowed to miss 21 days of work within one parliamentary session before they are fined. They then could be docked $120 a day if they continue to miss work without providing a good excuse.

MPs report their attendance to the House's human resource office each month and are allowed to take off work if they are sick, working in their riding, or are carrying out parliamentary business.

But it's not public.

By contrast, the Senate's monthly attendance records are. And if senators miss more the 21 days in a session, they can be fined $250 day.

Attendance record-keeping needs to be a "more transparent process," so constituents can monitor their MPs, Conservative MP Joe Preston, chairman of the house affairs committee, told CTV's Power Play on Wednesday.

"We think it's up to the constituents to judge," he added.

Preston said one of the ways Canadians can check on MPs' attendance already is by accessing their voting records, which were put online last month.

New Democratic MP Nathan Cullen also said attendance records should be open to the public.
"Ultimately our bosses are our constituents that elect us and put us here," he told Power Play host Tom Clark. "They need to know are we showing up."

Cullen said independent Quebec MP Andre Arthur has been absent "quite a bit" because of his new television show.

Arthur is a former radio show host and now hosts a talk show on the Quebec television network.

Your MP

You can check your MP's voting record by logging on to http://www.parl.gc.ca/. Once there, click on the Members of Parliament link to find your representative. Your MP's section will have a tab labelled votes. Click on it and it will take you to a list showing how he or she voted on past bills.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Keep them comming to work is good start. We have to make sure they work, and do what they supposed to do in those offices.

2:46 PM  

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