Roundup: Attendance under the microscope

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As one of those fun little articles to fill the pages over the holidays, the Ottawa Citizen looked at party leaders’ abysmal QP attendance records. What it showed was, predictably, pretty abysmal, with the Prime Minister coming in with the worst attendance record, and Justin Trudeau not far behind. As someone who attends QP regularly, I could have told you as much, but it’s nice to see some recorded figures and percentages, though when you think about it, Mulcair’s increase is really means he’s there one more hour per week. The piece also treats Friday QP as a regular day, which it hasn’t been as long as I’ve been covering it, but perhaps we should pay more attention to it and treat it as more than just a rump where those MPs who aren’t jetting off back to their ridings stay behind to hold the fort. There is one thing in the piece that did bother me, which was the load of nonsense that Peter Julian said about Michael Ignatieff, because it’s completely false. Ignatieff was there for QP on most days – far more than Harper was. The “not showing up for work” figure that the NDP used in the last election was based on voting records, and it was misleading because Ignatieff made a policy not to vote on private members’ business whenever possible in order to free his caucus to vote as they chose rather than to take direction from him. That meant he attended fewer of these votes, but the NDP falsely treated that as an attendance record. For them to continue to spread disinformation about Ignatieff’s attendance is shameful (but not surprising, alas).

Good reads:

  • It being the New Year, CBC has lists of a bunch of changes to things like family tax measures, and immigration changes.
  • Veterans Affairs alleges that some of its clients are exaggerating their injuries to avoid returning to the work force. How long before we can expect an apology for this?
  • Joan Bryden talks to people seeking nominations in the next election despite the cynicism that surrounds politics, and profiles a few more of them.
  • Laura Payton talks to a former Commons page who is trying to improve the awareness around the parliamentary budgeting process (in stark contrast to a certain attention-seeking vapid narcissist of a former Senate page).
  • The exodus continues as the vice-president of the Bloc Québécois left the party after a dispute with the new leader.
  • The Elections Commissioner says that he won’t reopen the investigation into the Guelph robocalls unless new information comes to light.
  • It looks like the RCMP decision to pull out of the press conference that launched an anti-terrorism handbook for Muslim groups was more at the behest of PMO and PCO than their own concerns.

Odds and ends:

NDP MP Sylvain Chicoine is countersuing his former staffer.

In case you missed it, here’s the MP Canadian wine panel from Power Play.

And here’s a 1920 tourism film about Ottawa. (Note that they used a photograph of the old Centre Block, which was being reconstructed at the time of this film).