Just got the notice in my inbox this morning about a project — freshly launched — called Visible Government. This non-partisan group is trying to build online tools it hopes will improve the ability of Canadians to learn about and monitor the activities of the federal government.
It has three projects on the go — and it hopes to add many more — one of which is working towards creating some kind of standardized database for the disclosure of the expenses of politicians and their political staff. Right now, each department publishes how much each Minister, for example, spent to travel, eat, and sleep while doing the government's business. That's great but the data is published in an HTML table and only contains information about that one minister. If you wanted to compare that minister's spending with others, you've got to extract data from several HTML tables and that's a chore. And what if, for example, you wanted to compare Joe Volpe's spending on pizza dinners when he was Human Resources Minister with current Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg's penchant for pizza dinners? You can do it, but you are in for a long day of manually extracting information from lots and lots of HTML tables.
Some of us on the Hill have grumbled about trying to convince the government to take the next step with proactive disclosure (as this initiative is called) and publish the data in a way that is more useful to the public.
The Visible Government project, which may be modelled on the excellent OpenSecrets approach that tracks U.S. federal government disclosure info, looks to just that.
Visible Government is also working on a forum for tracking and discussing bills before Parliament, following the example of the U.S. site, OpenCongress. That's another great idea although the Library of Parliament does a relatively decent job of publishing information about bills at its LEGISinfo site and will even deliver an RSS feed about a bill you're interested in. Of course, the parliamentary Web site doesn't provide an online forum for discussion about bills nor does it do much in the way of tagging bills for search services like Technorati and so on.
This sounds like a good idea if it is indeed a non partisan project. One thing in particular that I find difficulty tracking is whether or not legislation and announced plans are actually being implemented. For example, about a year or so ago the Conservatives announced they'd be implementing a ban on incandescent light bulbs. Since then I haven't been able find out if anyone is actually working on this or if it was just another case of Harper blowing smoke up my…
By the way. Here's a big story on mass graves in Canada you're missing out on.
http://www.stageleft.info/2008/04/18/residential-schools-locations-of-mass-graves-revealed/
Great idea, but alot of the expenses are very hidden. Numerous cabinet ministers expense through departmental accounts instead of ministerial accounts for example. Perhaps they should add a link to Corey Horners howdtheyvote.ca for voting records and speech records. How many MPs get away with the fact that they never speak in the house or when they do its on some planted question nothing to do with their riding…I think they need to start to be accountable…especially with all of those new “accountability” regulations…lol
Expenses for committee travel for example or interparliamentary association travel also. A very protected piece of information! This is were millions are spent but are never released publicly to the constituents to see how many but not all MPs benefit with their families also! There are abusers and there are those who refuse to participate (usually told to keep quiet by their fellow members). In addition public expenses such as printing accounts to see who is running up significant costs…please note there are 2 accounts those expensed to the MP and those expensed to the house account, one must be sure to report each!
When talking about transparency, let's not forget about the Elections Canada contribution and expenditure database. While it isn't in HTML, the search method is more than clunky and varies wildly between elections (presumably because of changing reporting requirements in the Elections Act)
Much of my day is spent trying to extract information from government websites, so this is sort of a pet peeve for me. Some easy ways that government could make information more accessible to the public:
1) The Parliamentary Library's treatment of legislation is top notch (I heart RSS feeds), but in the text of proposed (or passed) legislation, can't they link to the various acts that are being changed? It's all on line.
2) Figure out a way of telling me when new information is posted. DFAIT (kinda) does this with the travel advisory updates, but other government sites which contain substantially more complex information do not. If the spreadsheet I use for my hockey pool can tell people when I've made changes, presumably the government of Canada can do the same.
mbpowell, I've been adding election expenditure data in to the Pundits\' Guide, and will be adding more reporting on it in the coming weeks.
I'm not going to do contributions, as the site's mandate is more focussed on providing metrics for analyzing elections, rather than facilitating opposition research. However, I will soon be adding functionality that lets users see and search on categories of expenditures by candidates and parties. And in the medium-term, I'm hoping to provide links directly back to that candidate's return at Elections Canada, so individuals can search for themselves.
For the time being, for any riding in the 2003 representation order, you can click on “Financial Metrics” on the riding profile page, and see some of the candidates' spending metrics, and how much money was transferred to them by the central campaign. Here is an example using Windsor West.