Of the 8,556 individual votes cast in the 44th Ontario Parliament so far, exactly 25 broke from party lines. That is not a typo. Across 69 recorded divisions, 78 Progressive Conservative MPPs voted in lockstep on every single one. All 27 New Democrats did the same. The Greens: perfect unanimity. Only six Liberals and two Independents deviated at all, and even their rebellions were rare and narrow.
Ontario Pulse tracks every recorded division at Queen’s Park, every yea and nay for every MPP. We built a voting similarity model that scores each member’s record against the NDP and PC caucus averages. The result is less an ideological spectrum and more a paint-by-numbers portrait of four disciplined blocs marching in formation, with a few individuals wandering between the lines.
The party-line machine
Whipped votes are the norm in most democratic legislatures. Backbenchers occasionally cross the floor on conscience issues, regional concerns, or bills that cut against their riding’s interests. Ontario’s 44th Parliament has produced almost none of that.
Context: A “whipped” vote means the party leadership directs its members how to vote. In Ontario, virtually all recorded divisions are whipped. Free votes, where MPPs vote their conscience, are extremely rare and typically limited to private member’s bills on social issues.
The PCs’ 78 qualifying members (those who cast at least 10 votes) voted with their caucus 100% of the time. Not 99.5%. Not 99.8%. One hundred percent. Zero dissenting votes across the entire government bench.
The NDP matched that number exactly: 27 members, 100% party-line. Same for the two Green MPPs.
Infrastructure spending, health care reform, tenant protections, the tariff response. Did not matter. Party discipline held without a single crack.
Party Discipline Rate, 44th Parliament
Of the 69 recorded divisions, 59 split along government-versus-opposition lines. In every one of those 59 contested votes, the PC majority carried the motion and the opposition voted against. No crossovers. No surprises. The remaining 10 divisions passed with multi-party support.
The rebels: six Liberals and two Independents
The Liberals are the only recognized party showing any internal variation. Even there, the cracks are small.
Mary-Margaret McMahon (Beaches\u2014East York) broke ranks three times, the most of any party member. She voted against the third reading of Bill 27, the Resource Management and Safety Act (which included the Geologic Carbon Storage Act), and against Bill 17, the Protect Ontario by Building Faster and Smarter Act. Her third dissent came on a procedural motion. In each case, the rest of the Liberal caucus voted yea.
Stephen Blais (Orléans) and Jonathan Tsao (Don Valley North) each broke twice, both times voting with the government. Their most notable split: voting yea on the third reading of Bill 6, the Safer Municipalities Act, which restricts public consumption of illegal substances. The rest of the Liberal caucus voted against it. Two Liberal MPPs looked at a law-and-order bill and decided their ridings’ concerns outweighed their whip’s instruction.
That is the entire Liberal rebellion. Stephanie Bowman (Don Valley West) dissented twice: against Bill 17 (same as McMahon) and on a procedural motion. Stephanie Smyth (Toronto\u2014St. Paul’s) voted against Bill 17 as well. Ted Hsu (Kingston and the Islands) broke once on a procedural vote.
Context: The Ontario Liberal Party is currently operating under interim leader John Fraser, after Bonnie Crombie resigned in January 2026 following a leadership review. A party in transition, without a permanent leader, may have looser whipping than usual.
The two Independents tell a different story, and their voting records could not be more different from each other. Bobbi Ann Brady (Haldimand\u2014Norfolk), a longtime PC riding association president and former executive assistant to retired PC MPP Toby Barrett, ran as an Independent after the party bypassed the local nomination process. She dissented on 10 of 51 votes (a 19.6% break rate), voting against the Special Economic Zones Act (Bill 5, all three readings), the budget implementation bill (Bill 24), the More Convenient Care Act (Bill 11), and two procedural motions. Her pattern suggests someone who came from the PC world but balks at the scale of spending under Ford’s third term.
Chris Scott (Sault Ste. Marie), who was removed from the PC caucus in September 2025, dissented on 4 of 27 votes. He voted against opposition bills on tenant protections (Bill 82) and transit accountability (Bill 70), plus two procedural motions. On everything else, he voted with the government.
One Independent who breaks from the PCs on fiscal grounds. Another who still votes with them on nearly everything.
The left-right spectrum that isn’t
We computed a voting similarity score for each MPP, measuring how closely their record aligns with the NDP caucus average versus the PC caucus average. A score of +2 means perfect NDP alignment; -2 means perfect PC alignment.
The result is not a spectrum. It is two cliffs with a canyon between them.
NDP members cluster between +1.60 and +1.77. PC members cluster between -1.64 and -1.81. Liberals sit at +1.31 average, closer to the NDP than to the PCs but not overlapping either group. No middle. No centrists. At least not by voting record.
Voting Similarity Score by Party (NDP-aligned to PC-aligned)
The gap between the most moderate PC member and the most moderate NDP member is wider than the entire spread within either caucus.
Where it gets interesting is inside the Liberal caucus. Stephanie Bowman’s score of +1.63 puts her nearly indistinguishable from NDP backbenchers, while Tsao sits at +1.12 and Blais at +1.17, meaningfully further from the NDP consensus. The 0.51-point gap between Bowman and Tsao is larger than the entire spread within the 78-member PC caucus. The Liberals are, by the numbers, the only party in which individual members’ voting records differ from one another in any detectable way.
The ghost voters
Showing up matters independently of how you vote.
The Premier himself attended only 56.5% of recorded divisions, missing 30 of 69 votes. He is not the lowest on the list. Kinga Surma (Etobicoke Centre), the Minister of Infrastructure, made it to just 22 of 69 votes. Peter Bethlenfalvy (Pickering\u2014Uxbridge), the Minister of Finance, managed only 31 of 69.
31 out of 69. That is how often the minister responsible for the provincial budget showed up to vote on legislation.
Cabinet ministers have legitimate reasons to miss votes: committee meetings, ministerial duties, federal-provincial negotiations. But those absences mean their constituents’ voices go unrecorded in the legislature’s formal decision-making. An absent yea is not the same as a recorded yea.
On the opposition side, NDP MPP Sol Mamakwa (Kiiwetinoong) attended 50.7% of divisions. His riding is one of the largest and most remote in the province, covering a vast stretch of northern Ontario (good luck getting to Queen’s Park on a Tuesday morning). Robin Lennox (Hamilton Centre), a new NDP member, hit 44.9%.
Average attendance by party tells a tidier story: Greens lead at 92.0%, Liberals at 86.0%, PCs at 85.3%, NDP at 84.6%. But those averages mask wide variation within the PC caucus. Eight members attended every single division while several cabinet ministers missed a third or more.
What this actually means
If your MPP belongs to the PC, NDP, or Green caucus, their voting record is indistinguishable from every other member of their party. No moderate wing. No rebel faction. No regional variation that shows up in the formal record. A voter in downtown Toronto and a voter in rural northern Ontario, if they elected MPPs of the same party, got identical voting behaviour.
That does not necessarily mean your MPP is not representing you. Constituency work, committee contributions, Question Period interventions, private advocacy within caucus: none of that appears in division records. An MPP who pushes their party behind closed doors and then votes with the caucus in public looks identical, in the data, to an MPP who never questions anything.
But the voting record is the only formal, public, verifiable measure of how your representative uses their authority in the legislature. And on that measure, the answer for most Ontario constituents is straightforward: your MPP voted exactly the way their party told them to, every single time.
Six of fourteen Liberals broke ranks at least once. Whether that reflects genuine ideological diversity or the absence of a permanent leader to enforce discipline remains an open question as the party heads toward its November leadership vote. For everyone else, the whip held. Perfectly.
Sources and verification: All vote data is sourced from the Ontario Legislative Assembly’s official Votes and Proceedings records (ola.org). Ontario Pulse tracks 8,556 individual vote records across 69 recorded divisions of the 44th Parliament as of March 28, 2026. Party discipline rates are calculated from members who cast at least 10 substantive (yea/nay) votes. The voting similarity model computes the correlation between each MPP’s vote vector and party caucus averages. Attendance figures count recorded yea/nay votes as a proportion of total divisions. The 59 contested divisions figure counts motions where PC and NDP caucus majorities voted on opposite sides.
Look up your own MPP’s complete voting record on Ontario Pulse’s legislature tracker.