Sit!

While the crazy concept of public outrage over the non-sittification of a body of elected representatives is still fresh in your minds, look at this:

This graph shows the decline in relevance of the provincial legislatures, as measured by the average number of days the ten provincial legislatures have sat in each calendar year since 1987.
(The territories are excluded because the creation of Nunavut in 1999 would have exaggerated the downward trend of the past decade and not made for a fair apples:apples comparison.)

Of course, most provincial legislatures, like the House of Commons, sit less in election years. Even though that effect tends to be smoothed out by averaging all ten legislatures at once, the election-year effect is further smoothed out in this graphic by the addition of a four-year trailing average (the blue line.) The one mitigating factor in this sad picture is that the slide seems to have halted, at least for now.

In the immediate case of Dannystan, the House of Assembly, outside election years, ranked between second- and fourth-highest number of provincial sitting days from 1990 to 1995. Since 2000 (inclusive) it has only once cracked the top ten, in 2004. Since then, it has never ranked higher than eighth out of ten provinces.

In four of the past ten calendar year, the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island has sat more than the House of Assembly. Two of those years have been in the Dannystan era.

In the twelve calendar years since 1998 inclusive, at least one of the territorial legislatures has had more sitting days than the House of Assembly in all but two years. In the Dannystan era, the House of Assembly has never out-sat all three territories. In 2009, two of the three territories out-sat the Bow-Wows; in 2007 — an election year, to be sure — all three of them did.

The (unelected) Senate has had more sitting days than the (elected) House of Assembly in every calendar year from 1996 to the present day.

And in three of the the past seven calendar years, St. John's City Council has had more meetings than the House of Assembly has had sittings. In 2009, the two deliberative chambers were tied.

[Data sources: City of St. John's website, Library of Parliament.]