Pat O'Brien (2005)

What the record says

On June 6, 2005, in the House of Commons, the recorded affiliation of Pat O'Brien changes from the Liberal Party of Canada to Independent. No source is cited for this event record: it is a legacy lead, kept from an earlier phase of the project because it points at something real, not because anyone has checked it. This entry records the affiliation and its date. It does not record why the change was made, and nothing here should be read as a statement of motive. This paragraph was assembled by machine from the rows named in it, and is pending review.

Participants

1. Pat O'Brien

   CTF-EP-000114-01

   Liberal Party of Canada→ToIndependentTo the crossbenchWhere the seat went: The member left a caucus and sat as an independentThe change begins at a party and ends outside every caucus. No party gained the seat. A designation such as “Independent Liberal” or “(Not in Caucus)” is on this side of the line: it describes an alignment, not a caucus membership.What you may rely onWhere the member sat afterwards, and only that. Whether they walked out or were expelled is `voluntary_status`, which is recorded separately and reads unknown on most legs; /coverage has the live share.How it countsCounted as its own figure and never added to the floor-crossing total. They are different acts, and a single number that merged them could not answer either question.

   Marked as a label rather than a party: the database has no party row for this side of the transition. Overwhelmingly this means the member sat as an Independent, and there is deliberately no “Independent” party.

   Riding

   not recorded

   Effective

   June 6, 2005

   Kind of transition

   Changed party affiliation

   Voluntary

   Not recorded

   Direction

   Not recorded

   Appointment

   Not recorded

How rare is this?

Claims and the sources cited for them

Every statement this record makes is stored as a separate claim with its own review state and its own citations. A claim with no citation is shown as such rather than omitted.

1. Pat O'Brien changed affiliation from Liberal to Independent in 2005.

   Pending review

   Field:

   affiliation_change

   Confidence:

   Not assessed

   Signed by:

   Not signed by a named contributor

   Concerns a living person

   • Changes in Membership — machine-readable export (38th–45th Parliaments)

     House of Commons of Canada · August 31, 2026 · record PersonId=765; EffectiveDate=2005-06-06; Reason="Change of political affiliation — Liberal to Independent" · EN

     <MembershipChanges><PersonId>765</PersonId><ParliamentNumber>38</ParliamentNumber><EffectiveDate>2005-06-06T00:00:04</EffectiveDate><FirstName>Pat</FirstName><LastName>O'Brien</LastName><HonorificTitle /><Reason>Change of political affiliation — Liberal to Independent</Reason><ConstituencyName>London—Fanshawe</ConstituencyName></MembershipChanges>

     Official House of Commons record of the same change: same member, same party of origin, same party of arrival, same date.

     Archived copy — September 1, 2026

     CTF-S-NWS-FCE2483BD0AA · Reliability tier: primary official · Rights: link only · Accessed: September 1, 2026

   • Roles — Pat O'Brien — caucus memberships (XML)

     House of Commons of Canada · record CaucusMemberRoles; PersonId=765; caucus boundary at 2005-06-06T00:00:04 · EN

     Official House of Commons record of the same change: same member, same party of origin, same party of arrival, same date. The two <CaucusMemberRole> elements this citation rests on, transcribed from the XML: <CaucusMemberRole><CaucusShortName>Liberal</CaucusShortName><FromDateTime>2004-06-28T00:00:00</FromDateTime><ToDateTime>2005-06-05T23:59:59</ToDateTime><ParliamentNumber>38</ParliamentNumber></CaucusMemberRole> <CaucusMemberRole><CaucusShortName>Independent</CaucusShortName><FromDateTime>2005-06-06T00:00:04</FromDateTime><ToDateTime>2006-01-22T23:59:00</ToDateTime><ParliamentNumber>38</ParliamentNumber></CaucusMemberRole> Each element appears in the document exactly as written here, re-verified against the live XML on 2026-09-01, but they are separate elements and the document lists caucus periods newest first — so the pair above is a transcription assembled for reading, not a contiguous quotation. quote_excerpt held that assembled pair and was cleared on 2026-09-01, because the field promises text reproduced contiguously and word-for-word from the source.

     Archived copy — September 1, 2026

     CTF-S-HOC-ROLES-OBRIEN-765 · Reliability tier: primary official · Rights: link only · Accessed: September 1, 2026

2. On June 6, 2005, in the House of Commons, the recorded affiliation of Pat O'Brien changes from the Liberal Party of Canada to Independent. On 2026-09-01, 2 citations were attached to this record's affiliation claim, drawn from 2 sources, and they are recorded as pending review. The editorial status of the record is unchanged: it remains a legacy lead, and no editor has yet stood behind it. This entry records the affiliation and its date. It does not record why the change was made, and nothing here should be read as a statement of motive. This paragraph was assembled by machine from the rows named in it, and is pending review.

   Pending review

   Field:

   summary

   Confidence:

   Low

   Signed by:

   Official-source deterministic verifier

   Assumptions: Machine-assembled from this database’s own rows and from no other source. The text restates, as sentences, the participant rows attached to this record: the affiliation recorded on either side of each change, the date at the precision that row carries, the jurisdiction and chamber, whether the change is filed under a group event, and whether the event record behind it carries a citation. No date is printed finer than the row’s date_precision, so a year-precision row yields a year and never a day. Both languages are composed from the same rows rather than translated from one another. No motive, benefit, causation or characterisation of a person appears, and none may be added under this claim.

   Counterarguments: Two limits, stated rather than glossed. First, the prose is only as sound as the rows beneath it: where a party link is wrong the wrong party name is printed, and where an event is a legacy lead the sentence repeats an unverified lead — saying so, but repeating it. Second, restating a thin record fluently can make it read as established; the pending status on this claim, and the sentence inside the text naming the evidence state, are the only things that say otherwise. Four label-to-party mappings were deliberately not printed, because the party row’s name did not exist on the date of the event; the underlying links were left untouched and are still visible on the record.

   No source is cited for this claim.

What happened afterwards

Recorded outcomes only. An absence here means nothing has been recorded, not that nothing happened, and no causal link to the affiliation change is asserted unless a source establishes one.

No outcome is recorded for anyone on this event.

Revision history

Every change to this record is appended here. Nothing is edited away.

1. r4 expanded

   Wrote summary_en and summary_fr, both of which were empty. The text is machine-assembled from this database’s own rows and from no other source: the 1 participant row attached to this event, each with the affiliation recorded on either side, the date at the precision that row carries, the jurisdiction and chamber, and whether the event record behind it carries a citation (0/1). No date is printed finer than date_precision. No motive, benefit, causation or characterisation is asserted, in keeping with the published mandate of the automated validator that signs it. Both languages are composed from the same rows rather than translated from one another. The last sentence of the text says, in the text itself, that it was assembled by machine and is pending review, so the disclosure travels with the paragraph through the API and through a copied quotation. The text is recorded as claim CTF-CL-SUM-024A220AC676, kind project_analysis, assertion status pending_review. Nothing was copied or paraphrased from any encyclopaedia: the earlier removal of Wikipedia-derived prose from this project is not reversed by this change. Publication status and verification level are unchanged.

   September 1, 2026 · Official-source deterministic verifier

2. r3 corrected

   Date precision upgraded from year (2005-01-01) to day (2005-06-06) using the Library of Parliament PARLINFO record.

   September 1, 2026

3. r2 corrected

   Corrected the stored permanent URI. It pointed at /en/crossings/pat-obrien-2005, a path this site has never served, so the citation target returned HTTP 404. It now points at /crossings/pat-obrien-2005, the canonical record address. No fact, date, party, participant or source in this record was changed.

   September 1, 2026

4. r1 created

   Imported from the legacy archive as an unpublished research lead. Historical narrative, motive labels, and benefit scores were not treated as verified claims.

   July 31, 2026 · Crossing the Floor project maintainer