December Ottawa Lobbying Update 2
October's most lobbied public office holders and institutions, and who lobbied them
In today’s issue, we look at the public office holders and federal government institutions that saw unusual communications activity in October, and which sectors and organizations drove those communications.1
CliffsNotes version:
Once we clean up duplicate filings (filings for the same meeting by separate registered lobbyists, as well as erroneous double-filings), the 3,800+ communication filings in October amounted to 3,280 separate meetings.
746 of these meetings involved an MP, and 504 meetings involved high-level bureaucrats (Associate Deputy Minister (ADM) or higher)
Jeff Labonte, ADM at NRCan, takes the top-spot as most lobbied DPOH in October, displacing Finance Canada’s Hannah Wilson, who held the top-spot for the previous two months.
ISED, Finance Canada, NRCan and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) topped the list of institutions with the highest meetings activity in October, with the latter two in particular moving up.
Among the sector-institution pairs with unusual deviations in lobbying activity; environmental NGOs, Power generation companies and Oil and gas companies stood out in their lobbying of both NRCan and the Privy Council.
While September’s campaign-outliers were crop producers’ lobbying of the Senate related to Bill C-234, and Armatec’s Ukraine-related lobbying efforts of the DND, both of these campaigns have dropped way off in October. Instead, the most noteworthy campaigns include Enel Green Power’s lobbying of NRCan, and Pathways Alliance’s lobbying of NRCan and the Privy Council.
1. Meetings in October
Once we clean up duplicate filings (filings for the same meeting by separate registered lobbyists, as well as erroneous double-filings), the 3,800+ communication filings in October amounted to 3,280 separate meetings. 746 of these meetings involved an MP, and 504 meetings involved high-level bureaucrats (Associate Deputy Minister (ADM) or higher)
2. Most Lobbied Civil Servants in October
Exhibit 1 shows October’s 25 most lobbied designated public office holders (DPOHs), listing the number of meetings they took, their title, and the institution they represent. (Readers can find the institutional abbreviations here.)
Jeff Labonte takes the top-spot in October, displacing Hannah Wilson who held top-spot for the previous two months running. October also saw a significantly higher-than-usual number of MPs in the top-25, with four: Adam Chambers (Conservative) from Simcoe North, Gerrard Deltell (Conservative) from Louis-Saint-Laurent, George Chahal (Liberal) from Calgary Skyview, and Rick Perkins (Conservative) from South Shore—St. Margaret.
In the lead-up to COP28, as well as the controversy surrounding carbon tax legislation, it is unsurprising that the biggest difference between October’s meetings relative to the previous two months is the dominance of DPOHs in environment-related institutions. This can be seen with the two top-spots going to high-ranking bureaucrats at Natural Ressources (NRCan) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).
This is confirmed on LobbyIQ’s institutions-dashboards. For NRCan, for example, Exhibit 2 shows Jeff Labonte, Michael Vandergrift and Kyle Harrieta all with significantly elevated meeting-volumes in October. (Paul Halucha, in third spot, was recently put in charge of clean growth at the Privy Council, but still took NRCan meetings in October.)
2. Communications by Government Institution
Moving on from the DPOH-centric view above, we aggregate up to the government institution to see which agency saw unusually high lobbying-communications in October. To answer this question, we run a prediction model over aggregate filings at the institution-month (a panel of 160 monthly-frequency time-series), allowing for separate cyclical shifters for each institution.
Exhibit 3 displays all institutions with an absolute (i.e. positive or negative) deviation in lobbying relative to trend of 15+ in October (ie the Excess column). Taking ECCC in row 3 for example, Exhibit 3 reports that 87 unique DPOHs were involved in 256 separate meetings (123 in excess of predicted), with the average meeting involving just under two bureaucrats (467/256).
For a comparison to last month, see here:
3. October’s Institution-Sector Outliers
Often there is interesting information in also seeing who is lobbying an institution that is getting lobbied more than usual. To break this down, we run a prediction model of lobbying on data aggregated to the institution-sector pair (roughly 1 million observations across 15 years of monthly data) to identify outliers at this pair-level.
Exhibit 4 shows instances of unusual excess lobbying in an institution-sector pair. In some cases, the majority of Exhibit 3’s excess communications can be explained by specific sectors. For example, the excess communications in NRCan and Privy Council can both largely be explained by excess meetings with environmental NGOs, Power generation companies and Oil and gas companies.
This is confirmed on LobbyIQ, where Exhibit 5’s snapshot for NRCan confirms the elevated communications activity from these three sectors (in the +/- column of the Movers table).
4. October’s Institution-Organization Outliers
Every month, there are a handful of specific organizations’ with highly targeted lobbying campaigns directed at one or two institutions. We identify those by aggregating meetings to the institution-organization pair (5+ million observations across 15 years of monthly data) and looking for outliers relative to a simple prediction model.
Exhibit 6 displays nine outlier pairs that get flagged by this exercise in October.
While September’s outliers were crop producers’ lobbying of the Senate related to Bill C-234, and Armatec’s Ukraine-related lobbying efforts of the DND and PMO, these have dropped way off now. Instead, the most noteworthy campaigns include Enel Green Power’s lobbying of NRCan, and Cenovus’ and Pathways Alliance’s lobbying of NRCan and the Privy Council.
This can be tracked from various angles on LobbyIQ’s dashboards. Exhibit 7, for example, shows a snapshot from the Electric power generation dashboard where Enel Green Power is the third-biggest outlier in terms of comparing October to the previous twelve months. (The reason Enel makes Exhibit 6 while TransAlta and Boralex do not is that the latter two’s elevated communications activity was more dispersed over different agencies.)
This concludes today’s newsletter.
Next week starts our reporting on the November data. Next week also sees a rotation in the sequence of topics we cover, a change we are making by popular demand. Going forward, each month’s newsletters #3 and #4 will cover the most-lobbying active sectors and institutions in the previous month, and newsletters #1 and #2 will cover lobby-firms and issues/subjects. In December, this will mean that our newsletters #3 and #4 cover the same topics as December’s newsletters #1 and #2, but reporting on November data instead of October data.
Lobbying communication filings need to be reported to the government by the 15th of the next month. Civil servants then take a few days to enter those filings into the public record. By the end of a month, the previous month’s filings are approximately complete. Given this cadence, Queen Street Analytics’ first 2 newsletters in any month consider the “last month” to be two months before, and the 3rd and 4th newsletter switch to considering “last month” to be the month before. For example, December’s issues #1 and #2 cover October, and issues #3 and #4 cover November. Restated, the data landscape for GR activity in November is analyzed in December’s newsletters #3 and #4 plus January’s newsletters #1 and #2.