Data
The Evidence Behind the Book
No I in Team: Party Loyalty in Canada explores a fundamental question in Canadian politics: Why do most parliamentarians remain so loyal to their political parties?
We’ve examined the institutional forces and political culture that create strong expectations for party discipline and teamwork. This includes a closer look at the psychology of group loyalty, the influence of workplace dynamics in political settings, and how partisan norms shape behaviour across all levels of experience—from first-time candidates and rookie MPs to long-serving party veterans.
We are providing access to our full party defectors database and briefing notes through the University of Alberta Borealis-Dataverse. Researchers can avail of:
- Party Defector Database: A comprehensive database of Canadian parliamentarians who left their party caucus between 1980 and 2021 but continued serving as Independents or members of another caucus. Our dataset captures 349 instances involving 333 individuals, some of whom exited more than once. For each case, we documented key details including name, year of departure and/or defection, years in office, province, gender, age, and the parties involved.
- Party Defector Briefing Notes: We enriched this database by reviewing over 3,000 news stories, producing hundreds of briefing notes that contextualize the controversial circumstances around each departure. This work offers a rare, in-depth look at party switching and disloyalty in Canadian federal and provincial politics.
To supplement these data, while researching No I in Team we also:
- interviewed 90 politicians and political staff across Canada between 2018 and 2024;
- inspected transcripts of a dozen MPs who were interviewed in the late 20th century as part of the Library of Parliament’s Oral History Project;
- coded transcripts of exit interviews with 91 MPs who retired between 2008 and 2021 administered by the Samara Centre for Democracy;
- examined a transcript of a panel discussion about party discipline that we organized with some parliamentarians who left their parties, which was held at Memorial University in February 2020;
- listened intently to 15 long-format interviews with sitting MPs conducted in 2022 and 2023 by CBC radio’s The House as part of its “Backbenchers’ Backyards” series;
- consulted transcripts of the Canada West Foundation’s webinars with some former premiers and provincial ministers about life in a government caucus, which aired in January 2024;
- drew on a transcript of a recorded panel discussion of three parliamentarians on the topic of party politics and Independents that was hosted in January 2024 by the Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy in Toronto; and,
- Integrated information from scholarly literature and news reports.
Through this project, we aim to better understand how loyalty is forged, enforced, and sometimes broken in Canada’s parliamentary system.