randomosity

In an earlier post, I pondered the occupational composition of the House of Commons and its implications on policy making. This posts casts an historical gaze on the occupations of MPs at Confederation comparing the structure with the current and hypothesizing about the evolution over the past 160 years.
As I mentioned earlier, I had a sense that lawyers were a more dominant force in earlier times and that business men and women possibly have a more decisive role in policy making today than earlier. This chart:

shows the occupational composition of the Canadian Parliament in 1867. When compared with the current composition:

this anecdotal idea that businessman have risen in dominance is not supported. Although lawyers formed a much larger proportion of the house in 1867 than they presently do, it is in other areas that we have seen greater change. Business men and today women continue to hold the largest proportion of seats. However, as discussed earlier, it is those self-identifying as administrator/professional civil servants that have assumed a greater role. The other significant change is the emergence of educators as a representative group.
To gain a wider perspective, this bar chart compares number of MPS for each occupation for three sessions of Parliament - the first two of the nineteenth century and the current session:

The next post will examine regionalism, party politics from an occupational perspective.

I used the tree chart tool from Many Eyes to create these visualisations.