Discussions on Canadian Politics

That sounds like a really good idea. I've found a list of government bills here. It shouldn't be too hard to crawl the full list of bills and import them into Freebase as a spreadsheet.

The question becomes how do we model this data. It looks like there's lots of data linking a bill to the politician who put the bill forward but how do we differentiate between government bills, private member's bills and senate bills?

I assume that each act will have a unique name which can be used to link it back to the various bills that contributed to it. It might also be useful to link acts to political issues so that they can be grouped that way. Let me know what you think.

There are a couple types for bills in bases: one for the US (Bill) and one for Brazil (Proposal). The two are close enough in execution that I've been wanting to merge them into a Bill type in the Law commons, but it's been a low priority.

Spencer has a Law type (for what the bill becomes), which is pretty good, I think -- it's linked to alexbl's Bill type.

(The relationship of Bill to Law is problematic to a certain extent -- obviously not all laws come from bills, which would have to be addressed somehow in a Law schema. The US poses problems in that different houses in a legislature -- for sure in Congress, but probably in some states, too -- can pass differing versions of a bill, which then have to be mashed together to make a law out of. Modeling that in a way that can also work with bills of non-mashing-together governments is also tricky.)

I'm not sure that it can be. I guess for non-Commonwealthers there's some confusion about what exactly the role of a Governor General is. So I suppose we could fill out the list of Governor-Generals.

Naturally there's not much historical precedent for this sort of crazieness so there's not a lot of additional information to put this in context. We'll probably have a new leader of the opposition by the end of the week so thats something that can be added. But for the most part our fearless leaders will be sitting around doing nothing until January which should give me some time to enter the results from the October federal election and the Queebc provincial election that took place today. Both data sets require some major reconciliation work.