After a successful Black History Month display for February, Education Library has prepared a display of teachers’ citizenship resources for the month of March.  Titles range from books on civics, politics, parliament, rights and laws, as well as take-home bookmarks, pamphlets and handouts to use in the classroom. 

MPs and Senators study, debate and vote on a variety of issues and most of them wind up impacting most of us.  Ever wondered how they do their research?  As outlined in our entry of March 22, the Parliamentary Information and Research Service (PIRS)  has researchers on staff who “obtain and analyze material, and write…research papers at the request of Senators and Members of the House of Commons.”

Those research papers are freely available from the Library of Parliament webpage and provide you with a well-researched, cited, and readable summary of issues being studied in Parliament.  Why not take advantage of this tax-payer funded service when conducting your own research?

Here are some of the latest reports:

• Social Media: Political Uses and Implications
• Anti-Spam Laws in Western Countries

• The Federal Debt & Rising Interest Rates: Should We be Worried?

Researching older issues?  PIRS has reports on-site from as far back as 1991, though the majority are from 2006 – 2009.  For example:

• There are 8 different reports pertaining to the Official Languages Act, including Section 41 of the Official Languages Act: Scope, Evolution and Implementation Framework (2001)

• Sustainable Forest Management in Canada: Clear Policy – Questionable Practice (19 July 2005)

• Sexual Orientation and Legal Rights: A Chronological Overview (26 September 2005) – compare this document to this one from 2010: Sexual Orientation and Legal Rights (24 February 2010)

The array of topics covered by PIRS is impressive, so if you’re looking for some primary source documents or if you are looking for something from the government’s perspective you may be well-served by the documents you find on their site!

Have you ever had a difficult time gathering government data together on a single topic in a single place?  This can sometimes be challenging.  For example, mandatory disclosure documents: each government department is required to disclose  information such as travel & hospitality expenses; contracts; position reclassifications; grant & contribution awards; and proven workplace wrong-doing.  Until recently, you would have had to go to each website and click on each mandatory disclosure link separately to research this information.  The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat does provide a list of mandatory disclosure pages for each federal government website but this is just a directory – there is no search interface that would allow you to search the content of those pages all at once.

Fortunately you now have a “one-stop” search option thanks to the efforts of VisibleGovernment.ca – an advocacy group devoted to “improv(ing) civic participation and government accountability in Canada by promoting online tools for government transparency.” VisibleGovernment.ca has  a great database called disclosed.ca which you can search for federal government contract information by keyword.

“Disclosed.ca keeps track of 247253 contracts available since 2004 under the Government of Canada Proactive Disclosure mandate.”  Each entry includes:

• the name of the government agency and the vendor used
• a brief description of the work undertaken or service provided
• contract date and duration
• value – i.e., cost of the contract in dollars.

Another tricky type of information to access from a single search point is MP voting records.  The Parliament of Canada’s website does provide a vote tab in the profile for each MP, but you might prefer doing your research on the How’d They Vote website instead.   This “non-partisan website” was launched by an individual in 2005 and offers an impressive array of features.  You can:

• View a list of all the MPs for the current Parliament and session – with figures for categories of information such as number of dissensions, absences, bills proposed, words spoken and number of times they were quoted and you can re-sort the list by any of these categories.
• You can browse the voting history of bills for the current Parliament and session
• You can browse a list of all the bills under consideration for the current Parliament and session
• You can download a list of the sitting MPs and their voting records for the previous sessions of the current Parliament AND both sessions of the 39th Parliament as well.

Another area of difficulty surrounds Freedom of Information requests.  It can be very expensive and time consuming to make Freedom of Information requests.  You can learn about the Federal process by consulting the website for the Office of the Information Commission of Canada and the BC Provincial process by consulting the website for the Office of the Information & Privacy Commissioner for BC.   What’s lacking however, is a database of Freedom of Information requests that would allow you to search and view requests – and even better – a database of released documents that you could download.  While numerous advocacy groups in the US have put up databases of FOIA requests and documents (see our Feb 10, 2010 post for details) very little of a similar nature exists in Canada.   Fortunately we can now alert you to one promising project:

• “Open Government Records is software for creating freedom of information (FOI) and Access to Information (ATI) repositories. These FOI or ATI repositories offer many options to researchers who use freedom of information. OGR has features for making, tracking, storing, and publishing the text of freedom of information requests and similar features for the actual disclosed record.”
• The categories of documents that will be collected are: public servant curricula; scholarships & grants; “amber light” requests; and documents from Ministries of Education.
  • To date we have not been able to locate any uploaded documents, but there are several Freedom of Information requests deposited and available for viewing.  If  this site ultimately does begin to be populated with  “freed” documents it will be a dynamite research resource!

Ever wondered how MPs and Senators research issues?  Did you know that the Library of Parliament has a research service for parliamentarians – the Parliamentary Information & Research Service (PIRS)?  Or that  PIRS provides free public access to its publications?  Click here to view the list of available research publications.

“PIRS (responds) to questions that require research and analysis on legal, economic, scientific, or social science matters. Researchers obtain and analyze material, and write letters, short notes and longer research papers at the request of Senators and Members of the House of Commons.”

• These documents provide insight into the depth/type  of information that MPs and Senators have prior to debates and votes
• Publication categories include Aboriginal issues, agriculture, business, copyright, crime, public debt, defense – including much about Afghanistan, education, environment, fisheries, health, human rights, immigration, legislative summaries, taxation and transport.
• Documents added since January 2010 include Clean Coal?; Cybersecurity and Intelligence: The US Approach and Productivity: Its Increasing Influence over Canadians’ Standard of Living and Quality of Life.