Return to a caucus after departure, suspension or expulsion

Inclusion rule

Include as a separate event with its own date. Some compilations treat a departure and a return as one episode; we do not, because the return is a change in the affiliation of record, it is frequently the newsworthy half, and collapsing the pair destroys the interval a reader needs in order to say how long the member sat alone. That interval is the point. A member who goes to the crossbench, faces a general election and then sits under a new banner has done something the voters were asked about; a member who joins another caucus without an election in between has not. The two are the same shape leg by leg, so the record derives the answer per pair, from the dates, rather than storing it — and reports it as unknown wherever the election series is too thin to assert that no election happened.

Counting rule

One event, counted toward neither published figure, and published as a third figure of its own. Adding it to the crossings would count one person twice for a single episode, since the outbound leg is already counted as a departure to the crossbench; dropping it would hide the most interesting cases in the record. A departure and a return are two events by one person: the event total rises by two, the distinct-person total by one. This is the single most common way a floor-crossing count is misread, and the reason a figure must always name its unit.

Worked examples

• Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay: Independent on 28 May 2026, back with the Bloc Québécois on 19 June 2026

  The return, paired with the departure at CTF-E-000275. Both day-precision and corroborated. One person, two events, twenty-two days apart.

  in the database, verified CTF-E-000276

• Lionel Carmant: leaves the Coalition Avenir Québec caucus on 30 October 2025, returns on 1 April 2026

  The return, paired with the departure at CTF-E-000286. Both at the highest verification level.

  in the database, verified CTF-E-000287

What the database holds under this class

3 events currently stored under this class’s event types. Open in the record