House of Commons · · every recorded division
A member of Parliament voted against their own party times.
%
- Votes cast
- Members
- Divisions
- Rate
This page contains no scores, ratings or rankings. It is a count of a single fact recorded in the public record: whether a member's vote matched the majority of their own caucus. Every number is produced by one query file, from one public database.
01 · The field
Almost nothing happens.
One mark per division, in order, one row per calendar year. A mark lights only if at least one member broke with their caucus on that vote. of divisions — — are dark.
Row length is not a design choice. It is how many times the House actually divided that year.
02 · The exceptions
And when it does, it is on a question the government did not ask.
The divisions where at least one member dissented, plotted in time. Height is the number of members who broke ranks. The ten tallest are labelled — and none of the ten is a government bill.
Free votes are not recorded as a category anywhere. They are visible only as a shape: the questions where the whip was lifted are the questions where this chart is not flat.
03 · What was being voted on
The exception has a shape, and the shape is procedural.
Dissent per thousand votes cast, by the kind of question before the House. A private member's bill is legislation introduced by a backbencher rather than by the government.
04 · By caucus
Every caucus holds. Some hold harder.
Colour encodes party identity only. It is never used here to indicate that a number is good or bad. Official brand values are listed in Method.
05 · By year
The denominator matters.
Raw dissent counts per year are misleading, because the number of divisions swings by a factor of ten between a legislative year and an election year. This is the rate: dissents per thousand votes cast, with the divisions behind each bar shown.
06 · The members
Two of the six are artefacts of caucus membership rather than of conduct, and the table says which. A count is not a virtue and this page does not treat it as one.
08 · Method, sources, corrections
How every number here was made.
Source
A local restore of the public openparliament.ca database dump, which is
itself derived from the official records of the House of Commons. Divisions
. Generated .
What “dissent” means
The field bills_membervote.dissent is true when a member's vote differs
from the majority position of their own party on that division. It is not a judgement.
It does not distinguish a matter of conscience from an absence, a whip's error, or a
deliberate protest.
A known artefact, disclosed
The raw flag returns dissents. of those belong to members sitting as Independents, for whom the source database records no party position at all — a caucus of one has no majority to break with. All belong to a single member. Where this page reports members breaking with a caucus, the figure is . Both numbers are published rather than one being chosen.
Party colours
Taken from each party's own live stylesheet, not from memory or from broadcast convention. Rendered here at raised lightness and constant hue so that they are legible on a dark ground and equal in weight; no party is rendered brighter than another.
Chart labels
Labels on the chart in §02 have room for about sixty characters. For bills, the label is the bill number and the subject given in the parenthetical of its long title. For motions, standard parliamentary preamble — “That this House call upon the government to…” — is removed so that the subject fits. Nothing is paraphrased. The full text of every division is shown on hover and is unmodified in the source.
Not included
Voice votes, which are the majority of decisions in the House and leave no record of individual positions. Committee votes. Absences. This page can only describe what was recorded, and a great deal is not recorded.
Corrections
No corrections have been issued against this page. When one is, it will appear here with the date it was made and what it changed — the original figure struck through, never quietly replaced.
The address to send one to is not open yet. This is a preview build and nothing here has been announced; a correction channel that nobody is reading would be worse than saying so. It opens before this page does.