Why Some Members Have No Grade: Our Coverage, Legislature by Legislature
Canada has fourteen legislatures, and each one decides for itself what to publish about its members and in what form. Some publish structured, machine-readable voting records. Some publish votes only inside the text of their daily minutes. Some publish financial disclosure summaries as searchable pages, others as documents that have to be read one member at a time. What Integrity Index can say about a legislator depends on where they sit.
This article sets out exactly what we have for each legislature as of September 2026, and why we leave a member unscored rather than guess.
The rule: no score without enough evidence
A member receives an integrity score only when at least three independent data streams exist for them. Federal MPs also need at least one public disclosure on file, because disclosure is the backbone of the federal score. Where a legislature's disclosure filings are not yet in our database at all, its members are left unscored until they are.
Earlier versions of the site gave members with no data a neutral 50, which displayed as a middling grade. That was misleading: it made missing data look like a verdict. An unscored member now shows "Unscored" and the reason.
Coverage by legislature
| Legislature | Sitting members | Scored | Main streams available |
|---|---|---|---|
| House of Commons | 346 | 333 | Disclosures, recorded divisions, office expenditures, delegation travel, committee roles |
| Quebec | 123 | 123 | Disclosures, recorded divisions, legislative activity |
| Ontario | 122 | 122 | Disclosures, recorded divisions, expenditures, political contributions, contracts, trades |
| Alberta | 87 | 84 | Disclosures, recorded divisions, legislative activity |
| British Columbia | 91 | 63 | Disclosures, lobbying, legislative activity (no recorded divisions yet) |
| Saskatchewan | 61 | 53 | Disclosures, recorded divisions, legislative activity |
| Nova Scotia | 56 | 36 | Disclosures, committees |
| New Brunswick | 49 | 36 | Disclosures, committee roles |
| Manitoba | 50 | 0 | Roster and bills; recorded divisions being added; disclosures not yet ingested |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | 36 | 0 | Roster and bills only; disclosures not yet ingested |
| Prince Edward Island | 26 | 0 | Roster and bills only; disclosures not yet ingested |
In total, 850 of 1,047 sitting federal and provincial legislators have a score. The three territorial legislatures are not yet covered. The Northwest Territories and Nunavut use consensus government without political parties, which will need a different presentation from the party-based chambers.
"Legislative activity" is built from the bills each member has sponsored, and counts for provincial members even when the number is zero. A member with no sponsored bills scores low on that factor, which matters less than it sounds because it carries one of the smallest weights. A "main stream" in the table means we hold that record for most of the chamber, not necessarily for every member. That is why a legislature with three listed streams can still have unscored members: someone elected in a by-election may not have filed a disclosure yet, or may have too few recorded votes to count.
What makes some legislatures harder than others
Votes published only as text. Saskatchewan, for example, records divisions only as lists of names in its daily minutes, with no vote database. Reading them meant parsing every sitting day and checking each list against its printed count. We describe that work in What Saskatchewan's 35 Recorded Divisions Show. British Columbia's recorded divisions are not yet in our database, which is why many BC members are still one stream short.
Disclosure formats. Federal disclosure summaries are published by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner in a searchable public registry. Provincial integrity commissioners publish in their own formats, from structured pages to documents that must be read one member at a time. Where the filings for a province are not yet in our database, we show no disclosure data at all rather than anything estimated.
Streams that do not exist everywhere. Not every jurisdiction publishes every kind of record. We currently hold trade records for most Ontario MPPs but none for federal MPs, and in several provinces we cannot yet connect lobbyist registrations to individual members. A missing stream is left out of the calculation, so a member is never penalised because their legislature publishes less.
Known gaps we are working on
- Quebec ballot matching. A small number of Quebec members show far fewer ballots than they cast, because some names in the National Assembly's records do not yet match the right member. Until that is fixed, treat an unusually low Quebec attendance figure with caution.
- Provincial ranks. Rank within a legislature is hidden from provincial profile summaries while we correct how it is calculated.
- Municipal councillors. We hold voting records for 81 municipal councillors but do not score them. Councils work differently from legislatures, and a score designed for Parliament would not fit.
How to tell what a profile is based on
Every scored profile has a breakdown listing which factors were available for that member and how each contributed. Factors marked as unavailable were left out of the calculation, not scored as zero. Our data coverage page shows the current state of each source, and the scoring article explains how the available factors are combined.
If you know of a public source we are missing for your province, we would like to hear about it. Write to us through the contact page.