MPs miss votes in Ottawa for good reason
March 18, 2026 7:23 PM
On March 7, the Globe and Mail published a special report on what seemed like an urgent topic: MP participation in Parliamentary votes.
The results, on first glance, were somewhat shocking. First of all, attendance records for MPs are sealed - no one knows, and no one is counting, how many sessions of Parliament our elected officials actually show up for.
A secondary means of measuring attendance is counting each MP’s participation in voting in the House of Commons.
According to this measure, many of our representatives aren’t representing very consistently.
38 out of 308 MPs have missed at least 20 per cent of Parliamentary votes so far in this session of Parliament, which began in 2008.
The vast majority of the worst offenders have been Liberal MPs, with ten of the top 15 absentees members of the Liberal party.
Even more egregious, topping the list are Michael Ignatieff, who’s missed 182 of 311 votes, and Stephen Harper, who has been absent for 142.
My default, knee-jerk reaction to this report like this was one of anger and cynicism. Don’t we elect these people?
Aren’t they obligated to actually show up for work?
You can’t run a business only showing up to board meetings half the time, so how the hell are you supposed to run a country?
And, like most knee-jerk reactions that one has from time to time, mine was wrong.
Sure, votes on bills and amendments, as well as on the more mundane day-today business of Parliament, are important.
That’s why our representatives vote on them.
But to be perfectly frank, most of these votes are foregone conclusions. The most important of bills, confidence issues like budgets, either must pass, or (when there is a minority, as is the case now) the government falls and we go into election season.
Because the Liberal party (and everyone else) doesn’t particularly want elections every time a less-than-ideal budget is presented, some MPs simply stay away on voting day, so that the party can express its displeasure without triggering an election.
Disingenuous? Sure, I suppose. But it’s pragmatic. That the Liberal party disapproves of the Conservative budget is obvious; it’s part of their role as Official Opposition.
However, to cause the dissolution of Parliament, grind important work to a halt and devote disproportionate resources to successive election campaigns simply to make a point would be ridiculous. So opposition MPs sometimes just… don’t vote.
Nevertheless, the fact that government decisions seem to run on autopilot most of the time isn’t my point.
Rather, we elect MPs locally with the expectation that they will, somehow, represent our specific and regional interests on the national stage.
Most of the time, the House of Commons is in session five days a week for three or four weeks at a time.
MPs have formal responsibilities that exceed simply attending Parliamentary sessions: they sit on committees, they have portfolios that they must keep up with, meetings, conferences, and summits to attend. Plus, they have to stay connected with their constituents, not to mention possibly seeing their families once in a while.
Remaining tied to Ottawa, attending every session, and making absolutely sure to say ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay’ when any vote is taken is, far from admirable, potentially one of the worst things an MP could do.
Representation is not sitting in a closed room, interacting only with fellow MPs and the occasional page. It isn’t spending months at a time in Ottawa (unless they… represent Ottawa, you know what I mean), reading about your own city or province in the newspaper instead of actually being there.
Real representation doesn’t look like a clique of self-contained, self-absorbed politicians debating strategy instead of policy.
So maybe these MPs, including Michael Ignatieff, who seem to have spent more time in the last two years traveling the country talking to people, being purposefully accessible, have it right.
Maybe keeping the country running involves less filibustering and passive aggressive partisan politics, less vote trading and pointed absences, and more time spent in the community. Ribbon- cutting, giant-cheque-presenting – these are pretty standard, and equally useless.
What about MPs, or any politician at any level who claims to represent constituents of any kind, pitching in on a regular basis at the local homeless shelter, or under supervised elementary school playground?
What about holding well-publicized open office hours, or monthly town hall style meetings, where motives can be questioned, decisions clarified, and assumptions challenged?
Without local engagement, how can MPs represent anyone? And if they don’t represent anyone, what use is arguing about how they vote?
