What Saskatchewan's 35 Recorded Divisions Show

Until this month, no Saskatchewan MLA on Integrity Index had an integrity score. We had their financial disclosures, but a score needs at least three independent data streams, and Saskatchewan's voting record was not available in any structured form. This article explains how that record is published, what it took to read it, and what 35 recorded divisions say about the 30th Legislature.

How Saskatchewan records its votes

Like other Westminster legislatures, the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan decides most questions by voice. A recorded division, with each member's name attached, happens only when members call for one. There is no voting database and no per-member vote feed. The record exists in one place: the Minutes published for each sitting day.

Inside the Minutes, a division appears as a sentence ending "on the following recorded division," then a YEAS heading with a count, then the names of every member who voted yea, one per paragraph, then the same for NAYS. Members who did not vote are not listed anywhere.

Reading 106 sittings

We read the Minutes for all 106 sitting days of the 30th Legislature published so far, from its opening in December 2024 to May 2026. The format is consistent, but the exceptions only show up when you read every sitting:

• Some headers are bilingual, for example "YEAS / POUR," with a French restatement of the question placed between the sentence and the list.
• A division where nobody voted nay can read "NAYS / CONTRE — Nil," or can omit the nays list entirely.
• Names appear as printed in the Minutes, including one hyphenated surname split by a stray space and one misspelling, so each had to be matched to the right member deliberately rather than by exact text.

Every list is checked against the count printed in its heading. If "YEAS — 31" is followed by thirty names, the division is skipped rather than stored with a missing member. All 35 divisions described here passed that check, and every one of the 1,864 names matched a sitting MLA.

What the record shows

The 30th Legislature has held 35 recorded divisions in that period. 28 carried and 7 were defeated. Eleven were on bills, including two Appropriation Acts, the Building Schools Faster Act and the Compassionate Intervention Act. Four were opposition amendments declaring that the Assembly had lost confidence in the government, one in each sitting period, and all four were defeated. Three were motions to adjourn the day's sitting. The rest were other motions, amendments and a committee report.

Every recorded ballot followed party lines. In all 35 divisions, not one Saskatchewan Party MLA voted differently from the majority of their caucus, and not one New Democrat did either. The two parties were on opposite sides in 26 divisions and on the same side in 9.

60 of 61 MLAs voted at least once. The exception is the Speaker, who by convention votes only to break a tie, and there were no ties.

Participation varies widely. Measured as the share of the 35 divisions in which a member appears on either list, attendance ranges from 57 percent to 100 percent. On the government side, 15 of 34 Saskatchewan Party MLAs appear on every list. On average, about 32 of the governing caucus and about 21 of the 26 New Democrats voted in each division.

What those attendance numbers do and do not mean

Thirty-five divisions is a small sample. A single absence moves a member's rate by almost three percentage points. Because the Minutes only list members who voted, we cannot tell a pairing arrangement from an absence, a committee commitment or a family emergency. The numbers show who is on the record. They do not say why someone is not.

Ministerial and house-leadership duties can also keep a member away from the chamber at the moment a division is called. That is why our score treats participation as one factor among several, and why a single legislature's division count should be read alongside its size: 35 divisions over a year and a half is a very different base from the 164 the House of Commons held in about a year.

What changed on the site

With votes added to disclosures and the other available streams, 53 of Saskatchewan's 61 MLAs now have an integrity score, up from none. Scores currently range from 70.1 to 81.2, with an average of 78.1. The remaining eight do not yet meet the three-stream minimum, and their profiles say so instead of showing a grade.

The nightly update now rereads only the recent Minutes, starting two weeks before the newest stored division, so new divisions appear the day after they are published without rereading the whole Legislature.

Check it yourself

Every division on Integrity Index links to the Minutes it came from. If you open a Saskatchewan MLA's profile and a vote looks wrong, the official page is one click away, and we would like to hear about it through our contact page. For the rules that turn these ballots into a score, read How the Integrity Score Works. For how the same kind of record looks in Ottawa, see How to Read a Voting Record.