Information is Essential.

With a federal election possibly in the offing in the near future I have been checking up on the actions of my current member of parliament. In doing so I have found two great sites that allow you to do just that far easier than on the official government site.

They both have a 'How they voted' page for each Bill and for each MP, a page showing the status of any particular bill and clips and links to each statement in the house by your MP. After having previously tried to find such information on the official site it is a real pleasure to do research via these 'unofficial' sites. There is an ever increasing effort by various citizens and organizations to 'mine' such information and present it in an easily searched and readable form, such efforts and those who use their expertise to make such information readily available to the 'technically challenged' must be thanked.

So check out http://openparliament.ca/ and http://howdtheyvote.ca/ both have a great deal of information but Openparliament in particular has links which allow you to subscribe by email or RSS to keep track of your MPs actions. Something we all need to do MUCH more of.

I have added these two to the 'Democracy on the web' links in the side bar where you will find a number of other useful web sites in this regard.

If you know of, or have a particular favorite site for obtaining information on government actions, spending, promises or other important data then let me know in the comments or by email and I will update this post with the links.

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