About this project

What a floor crossing is

A sitting member of a legislature changes party affiliation without resigning the seat and seeking a fresh mandate. Nothing in Canadian law prevents it, the conventions around it are unwritten, and reasonable people disagree about which changes of label should count at all — which is why this project publishes its inclusion criteria before it publishes a number.

What this is for

To be a record a reporter can cite on deadline: every entry with a stable identifier, a date at its real precision, a jurisdiction resolved against the institutional tables, and the sources — or the absence of sources — attached to each claim. The project makes no assertion about anyone’s motives. Where a source says why someone crossed, the source is cited and quoted; where none does, the record says nothing.

What the unit is

The event. A caucus that moved together on one day is one event with several participants, not several crossings. That single decision is the largest source of disagreement between published floor-crossing totals, and it is the reason our figure and a person-based figure are not comparable until one is converted into the other.

The counting rules

What it does not do

It does not score anyone. An earlier version of this site published a 0–10 "benefit score" with no method and no source behind it. That field is gone and nothing replaces it; recorded outcomes appear on each record with their causation state, and a finding of no inducement is recorded as a finding, not as an absence.
It does not tag motives. The editorial categories the earlier model carried — "Wanted Promotion", "Kicked Out" — asserted reasons no source established. They are not in the canonical model.
It does not claim to be complete. Coverage is uneven by jurisdiction and by period, most records are unverified leads, and the Senate holdings — though the model now represents them — have all yet to be reviewed, so no senator appears in a published total. Every one of those gaps is measured and published.
It does not publish what it cannot show. A record with no cited source is carried as a lead, labelled as one, and kept out of search indexes until it has been through verification.

The project’s view — not a finding

Stated by Crossing the Floor. Nothing below is derived from the record, and no record depends on it.

Everything else on this page can be checked against a source. This cannot: it is an argument, and a reader is free to reject it and keep every figure on the site.

Why this record separates two acts

The project holds that leaving a caucus to sit as an independent and carrying a seat into another party without an election are different acts, and counts them apart. This section states that view, marks it as a view, and sets out what the record cannot tell you about it.

Whose view this is, and why it is written down

Everything else in this methodology is a specification. This section is not. It is an opinion, held by the project, about what the two acts recorded here mean — set apart, headed as an opinion and attributed, so that no reader mistakes it for a finding and so that a reader who rejects it can still use every number on the site.

It is published rather than left implicit for the same reason the inclusion criteria are published. The project makes a choice here — to separate two kinds of change that most compilations add together — and a choice whose reason a reader cannot see is indistinguishable from an error. A reference work called Crossing the Floor that claimed to have no view about crossing the floor would be less honest than one that states its view plainly and keeps it out of the record.

What the project holds

Disagreeing with your party is a legitimate reason to leave its caucus. A member who does so and sits as an independent takes the disagreement to the place where it costs them something, and leaves the electorate’s decision intact: the seat stays where the voters put it, unattached, until the next election — at which point the member may seek a mandate under whatever banner they choose. That is the response this project regards as the proper one, and the record holds a great many of them.

Carrying that seat into another party’s caucus, without an election, is a different act. The seat was awarded to a person standing under a label, and moving it to a different label transfers something the voters were never asked about — frequently in mid-term, sometimes into a governing majority, and always without the constituency having any say until the next general election. That act is what this record exists to document, and it is what the site is named after.

This is not a novel standard, and the project did not invent it. One Canadian legislature has already written it into law: Manitoba amended its Legislative Assembly Act in 2006 to require a member who leaves the caucus of the party under which they were elected to sit as an independent for the remainder of the term, which makes a mid-term party-to-party crossing structurally impossible there. That is a fact about a statute, recorded in the inclusion criteria as a jurisdiction-specific rule and cited here as evidence that the distinction is a live one in Canadian practice — not as an argument that it is therefore correct, and not as a proposal that any other legislature follow.

That is the whole of it. It is a view about two acts. It is not a view about any of the people in this record, and it is not a proposal that either act be forbidden.

About the act, never about the person

No record on this site says why anybody acted, and this section licenses nobody to start. The view above is about the shape of an act — where a seat went, and whether voters were asked — and never about the character, the sincerity or the calculation of a named individual. Two members can make the same move for opposite reasons; the record shows the move, and stops.

That boundary is not a courtesy, it is enforced. The published limits on machine assistance forbid approving any claim about motive, benefit, causation or disputed interpretation, and the automated verifier’s own entry in the contributor register carries the same limit in the same words. The inclusion criteria hold, as a standing rule, that the motive for a change is never part of the inclusion test. This opinion widens none of that.

What the record cannot tell you about it

The heaviest limit on this view is that the record frequently cannot say whether the member chose to leave at all.

Whether a departure was voluntary is stored on each participation, and on the large majority of them it reads unknown. That is the honest value and not a placeholder: establishing that a member walked out rather than being removed needs a source that says so, and across most of the record no such source has been cited. The live share is measured on the coverage report, which is where any figure of that kind belongs.

Expulsion is not a choice. A caucus that removes a member has acted, and that member sits as an independent because of a decision that was not theirs. Nothing in the view above applies to them: there is no act of theirs for the project to hold a view about. Because the field is unknown so often, a departure to the crossbench in this record must be read as a statement about where the member sat afterwards, and never as a statement that they decided to sit there.

The stored classification is named for that reason: it describes a seat, not a motive. The same asymmetry runs through the rest of the record. The project can often show that an election fell between a departure and a later arrival; it can much more rarely show that none did, because an election missing from an incomplete series is indistinguishable from an election that never happened. Where that is the case the record says so instead of answering.

What follows for the numbers

The consequence is arithmetic, and it is the reason the distinction was worth making at all rather than being left as a remark on a page.

The floor-crossing figure counts legs whose two sides are both parties, and different parties. It excludes departures to the crossbench, arrivals from it, moves into or out of a parliamentary group, renames, election-time relabelling, and legs on which no ruling has yet been made.
Departures to the crossbench are a figure of their own, published beside the first and never added to it.
Arrivals in a party from the crossbench count toward neither. The outbound leg of the same episode is already counted as a departure, and counting the return as well would count one person twice for one episode. It is published as a third figure so that the delayed cases stay visible rather than vanishing between the two.
Each of those figures is published together with the number of legs on which no ruling has been made, because a count that hides its unruled remainder presents itself as more settled than it is.

If you disagree with any of this

Reject the view and the data still works. The classification is stored on each participation and published through the interface, so recombining the separated figures into a single total is one addition, and rebuilding a different split is a filter. Nothing was dropped in order to hold this position, and nothing is hidden behind it: the site’s standing rule is that contested classes are recorded and flagged rather than silently excluded, and this classification is subject to that rule like every other.

The distinction is also, separately, a factual one, and it survives the opinion. Whether a seat went to another party or to the crossbench is a question about two labels, answerable without agreeing with a word of this section. The opinion explains why the project counts them apart; the classification would be worth having either way.

Text last checked against the database: 2026-09-01

Machine assistance

Machines help with extraction and with proposing candidates for review. Nothing a machine produces is promoted to a published record without a person accepting it, and any proposal still waiting for that is shown on the record it concerns. The full disclosure is published with the methodology.

The record right now

affiliation events: 551
meet the publication standard: 35 of 551
carry at least one cited source: 490 of 551
upper chambers in the model: 1

Measured when this page was requested. No figure on this site is written into its source. October 4, 2026 · 2026-08-01.1

Where to check us

CoverageWhat the database holds and what it is missing, measured live
MethodologyInclusion criteria, counting rules and verification levels
CorrectionsEvery published correction, with what changed and when
ReleasesDated, citable versions of the dataset
Licence and citationHow to reuse the data and how to cite it
MastheadWho compiles this, and how to reach them

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