Category talk:Members of the House of Commons of Canada

I think it would be useful to have categorisation which distinguishes present members of the House from former members. I find this significantly more useful than the present scheme, which forces me to remember what province a current MP is from and then find them in a long (though alphabetical) list.

I'd like to get some suggestions on this before going ahead. There are really three options:
 * 1) introduce a special subcategory for former members, and populate it with them
 * 2) introduce a special subcategory for present members, and populate it with them
 * 3) do both of the above.

For reference, I recently participated in a discussion on the French wikipedia on this subject. Currently they implement option (1) above: there is one supercategory, fr:Catégorie:Député fédéral canadien, and a subcat for former members, fr:Catégorie:Ancien député fédéral canadien.

I would rule out (2), since I think we do need a category for former members. It seems undesirable to require us to move a person up the category hierarchy when they leave office: it's losing information.

My preference would be for (3), i.e. to have both of the following subcats of Category:Members of the Canadian House of Commons:
 * Category:Current members of the Canadian House of Commons
 * Category:Historical members of the Canadian House of Commons

Is this overcategorisation? Thoughts? --Saforrest 05:15, 22 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Agreed. "Members of..." implies "current" and is misleading. For the time being I have changed the category description for Alberta and the North to read "current and former", which matches the descriptions of the other provincial categories. Which raises the question of whether this needs to be done at the provincial level too - I would think so. Outriggr 00:20, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I was about to make a comment about what I feel may be an overcategorization by province, and came on this proposal from 2006. I think this is a good idea to have a single category listing all current members, as well as past members. I will be bold here and try to do that. Keihatsu talk 15:06, 5 August 2020 (UTC)