A 2004 law requires Ontario cabinet ministers to attend at least two-thirds of all Question Periods or face a $500 fine per missed day. The Premier is personally responsible for issuing those penalties. No fine has ever been confirmed as levied. And in July 2024, the Investigative Journalism Foundation reported that the Premier himself attended less than two-thirds of recorded votes during the 43rd Parliament.
So the person who skips votes is also the person who decides whether skipping votes has consequences. The 44th Parliament is approaching its first full year, and the systems designed to enforce accountability remain, by all available evidence, entirely unused.
No One Is Keeping Score
There is no searchable attendance register for Ontario MPPs. Want to know if your representative showed up? Comb through the Votes and Proceedings yourself, the official House record that logs which names appeared during recorded divisions. A missing name means a missed vote. No flag, no fine, no public notice. Nobody emails you about it.
A 2004 law requires cabinet ministers to attend at least two-thirds of all Question Periods or face a $500 fine for each missed day. The Premier is legally responsible for issuing those penalties. Has he ever done so? The Ministry of the Attorney General told journalists it was “not aware” of any fines ever being levied under that legislation during the 41st Parliament. Nothing public suggests that’s changed since. $500. Not exactly a deterrent even if someone did collect it.
Put another way: the Premier is responsible for fining his own ministers, and per the IJF’s findings, his own attendance rate during the 43rd Parliament fell below the two-thirds threshold the legislation treats as a minimum standard. So the person who skips votes is also the person who decides whether skipping votes has consequences.
What the Historical Data Actually Shows
The most complete party-level breakdown available comes from a CBC analysis of the 41st Parliament, published in 2018. Liberal MPPs attended roughly 87 percent of all recorded votes on average; NDP and PC members came in around 75 percent each. A handful of Liberals (Cristina Martins, Yvan Baker, Arthur Potts) hit 96 percent. Good for the résumé, and genuinely unusual.
Vote Attendance — 41st Parliament (CBC 2018 data)
Leaders were the worst offenders. Andrea Horwath: 54 percent of division votes. Kathleen Wynne: 66 percent. Democracy Watch co-founder Duff Conacher noted that leaders carry responsibilities beyond the chamber floor, and that’s fair, but the enforcement mechanism for rank-and-file MPPs (who don’t have that excuse) has never been triggered either.
That data is nearly a decade old now. The IJF’s 2024 work is the most recent hard analysis, but the full dataset is paywalled (this matters more than it sounds, because nobody else has done the work). Riding-by-riding figures for the 43rd Parliament’s entire run remain difficult to access without contacting the IJF directly.
The 44th Parliament: Early Days, Thin Data
April 14, 2025. The 44th Parliament opened following the February 27 snap election that returned Ford’s PCs to a third consecutive majority, something no party had pulled off since 1959. 124 MPPs. Hansard and Votes and Proceedings from the new session are available through ola.org, and less than a year of recorded divisions doesn’t produce the kind of statistical picture the IJF drew from a full three-year parliament. But the raw data is there for anyone willing to count.
And then there’s the Liberal problem. Bonnie Crombie lost her own seat in Mississauga East-Cooksville on election night. The Liberals won fourteen seats (enough to regain official party status for the first time since 2018) but their leader has no seat in the chamber. A 14-member caucus operating without its nominal head. Hard to track attendance when the boss isn’t required to attend.
Even the Senate Does Better
Canada’s Senate, not exactly a poster child for accountability, publishes a public online register logging every sitting day, sick day, and approved leave day for all 107 senators. Senators can be penalized or removed for excessive absence; Ontario Senator Andrew Thompson was effectively pushed out in 1999 under exactly that kind of pressure.
Ontario MPPs? Nothing. No register, no public log, no automated disclosure. The unelected chamber is more transparent than the elected one.
Accountability advocates like Conacher have pushed for a searchable system where constituents can see what their representative does “every day, every minute they’re on the job.” His assessment of why that hasn’t happened is blunt: politicians don’t want that level of scrutiny.
Citizen-Built Workarounds
Citizen-built tools have stepped in where the legislature won’t: tracking how MPPs vote, summarizing bills in plain language, letting users look up individual voting records. All volunteer-run, all unofficial. None of them can tell you whether an MPP was physically at Queen’s Park on a given day.
Committee work is its own black hole. MPPs do a significant portion of legislative work in committee, studying bills and hearing from witnesses, but nobody tracks that participation in any systematic way either.
Eventually the 44th Parliament will produce enough division records for a real attendance analysis. Until then, constituents are left with Votes and Proceedings, a handful of volunteer tools, and a $500 fine that nobody has ever bothered to collect.
Sources and verification: The IJF July 2024 attendance analysis (https://theijf.org/revealed-the-ontario-mpps-who-miss-the-most-votes-at-queens-park) is paywalled; the claim that Ford and over a dozen MPPs fell below the two-thirds threshold is attributed to that report but the precise percentages should be confirmed directly with the IJF. The 2018 CBC party-level attendance figures (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ever-wonder-how-often-your-mpp-voted-in-legislature-find-out-here-1.4688560) are verified from that report. The $500 fine provision and the Attorney General’s statement that no fines were issued during the 41st Parliament are drawn from the same CBC investigation; current enforcement status should be confirmed with the Ministry of the Attorney General. The 44th Parliament opening date of April 14, 2025 is confirmed via ola.org. Bonnie Crombie’s defeat in Mississauga East-Cooksville and the Liberal seat count of fourteen are based on 2025 election results.
Track how your MPP votes on every bill at Ontario Pulse.