The Ottawa Citizen has been carrying on their look at MP attendance in its many forms, and this time turned to the voting records of ordinary MPs. The best ones tended to be Conservative MPs, while the worst were independent and Bloc MPs for the most part, though a few other exceptions were noted, in particular because those MPs were battling cancer (like Judy Foote and Peter Kent). One of the notables for terrible voter attendance was Sana Hassainia, an NDP-turned-independent whose reasons for leaving the party were apparently over the position on Israel, though there was backbiting at the time about her attendance. Hassainia’s issue is her small children – she’s had two since she became an MP, and since most votes tend to be around 5:30 in the evening three, sometimes four nights per week, she claims she can’t get childcare and has to miss them. That’s always one of those claims that bothers me because it’s not like these votes are surprises – they happen on a scheduled basis, so you would think that she would be able to better schedule childcare. As well, she’s not without means – she makes a lot of money as an MP, and has the wherewithal to hire a minder or a nanny who can accommodate those times when she’s needed to vote. And it doesn’t matter how engaged she says she is with her constituents – her job is to vote, and that means showing up to vote, and to stand up and be seen to be voting, which not only has symbolic import, but it’s also a time when MPs are actually all in the same place so contacts can be made, and she can engage with ministers on files she has concerns with because they’re right there. This is an important thing, and it should be considered nothing less than a dereliction of her duties if she can’t see that.

Good reads:

• Opposition MPs are accusing the government of obstructing their right to know when it refused to grant them the data they were seeking about visas ant temporary foreign worker applications.
• The NDP have launched a complaint with Advertising Standards Canada about the government ad claiming the “million job shortages.”
• The Auditor General has delayed the release of the Senate report until later in the spring, but there is speculation that it may not happen until after the next election, particularly because some audits are taking a long time.
• Peter MacKay’s former chief of staff is returning from private practice to become Erin O’Toole’s chief of staff at Veterans Affairs – and O’Toole apparently needs it after this voicemail he left to a veterans group.
• Correctional Services is concerned about radicalization in prisons.
• Andrew Coyne writes about the way in which everyone is constantly taking offence to everything.

Odds and ends:

Apparently the RCMP made one of those terror arrests in Ottawa after the suspect bought a plane ticket to India.

Canada is trying to stop a NAFTA Commission on Environmental Cooperation from investigating the oil sands tailings ponds.