I'm interested in whether recent improvements in our access to the public record in Canada can help us better understand what elected representatives are doing on our behalves.

Members of Parliament are expected to act in the public interest, largely by deliberating legislative policy issues and proposing revisions or new legislation based on what they've learned.  What role do the systems of inquiry and deliberation in Canada's legislature play?  Do MPs rely on certain types or sources of information?  Does this depend on particular, identifiable variables?  Are patterns evident?

Sources

My dissertation research drew extensively on Canadian House of Commons standing committee data and lobbyist registry data, supported by a content analysis of government and stakeholder documents.

Canadians should tip their hats in thanks to Michael Mulley, developer of the website, openparliament.ca.  Purely as a personal project, he transformed a byzantine maze of federal parliamentary information into a usable structured database, further enhanced by a simple API and friendly front end. Since 2013, when I began collecting data for my research, the parliamentary website itself has undergone extensive revisions — to the government's credit.  In many respects I still prefer Michael Mulley's project.

A tangential discovery of my research was that significant materials that support and inform parliamentary deliberation remain uncatalogued, inaccessible and invisibilized. This includes briefs submitted to standing committees by stakeholders and subject experts, as well as analysis conducted by the Library of Parliament and contracted researchers.  In other words, a lot of analysis and feedback that parliamentarians use to justify their decisions are not being shared with us.