Lobbyists' drift to the Conservatives
The last seven months have seen something that has never happened before in the 16 years of recorded federal lobbying data: consistently higher lobbying of opposition MPs than of government MPs.
After this week’s data-dump at the lobby-registry, the November lobby data still looks pretty incomplete: eyeballing November 2024 compared to November 2023 on LobbyIQ’s big picture dashboard (Exhibit 1), it was either a very slow month, or we can expect another 1,500 or so November meetings getting filed by next week.
So, while we wait on that data to update, this week’s issue will dive into a new phenomenon that has shown up in the federal lobby data over the last half year and that seems to have so far gone unnoticed (amidst all the noise of a two-month filibuster, ongoing Liberal polling misery, the Boissonnault scandal, and Chrystia Freeland’s resignation): for the first time in the 16 years since the lobby data became digitally available have we seen lobbyists seeking out systematically more meetings with opposition MPs than with MPs representing the party in government.
In what follows, we discuss these data patterns, based on not-yet-publicly-available research by Christian Dippel and Lingxiao Leng at Ivey Business School, that studies how lobbying adjusts to political changes.
1. This Autumn’s Drift Towards Conservative MPs
The recent pivot towards lobbying of opposition MPs is shown in Exhibit 2, where each bar is the difference between that month’s lobby meetings with Conservative MPs minus lobby meetings with Liberal MPs in the same month. (A negative difference, in red, means there were more lobby meetings with Liberal than with Conservative MPs.)
The pivot in Exhibit 2 may not look dramatic visually (partly because its vertical axis range is scaled to match the exhibits further down), but its potential significance becomes apparent once we appreciate just how unusual it is for opposition MPs to get lobbied more than the governing party’s MPs. During the 186 months from November 2008 to May 2024, this only happened a grand total of 3 times (each time by a tiny margin); i.e. 1.6% of the time.
In contrast, Conservative MPs were lobbied more often than Liberal MPs in six of the last seven months; i.e. 86% of the time.
To see what business as usual looks like, Exhibit 3 shows the 24-month time-windows for this same data around the last four federal elections, in 2011 (Conservative incumbent won), 2015 (Conservative incumbent lost), 2019 (Liberal incumbent won), and 2021 (Liberal incumbent won).
What Exhibit 3 shows is that the governing party almost always gets lobbied more than opposition MPs, which makes the last seven months shown in Exhibit 2 were a pretty dramatic break from business as usual when it comes to federal government relations.
2. How Lobby Firms are Responding
If the patterns in Exhibit 2 are partly driven by an increasing perceived likelihood of a future Conservative government, then we may expect smart and forward-looking lobby-firms to prepare for this increased likelihood by hiring more lobbyists with connections to the Conservative Party.
A nice feature of Canada’s federal lobby data is that this can be seen directly because it includes a full account of all public offices held by registered lobbyists. With this data, Dippel and Leng tally up a monthly count of registered lobbyists (with active registrations) who are either former Liberal or Conservative staffers, and plot the difference between these two counts over time. Exhibit 4 would suggest that the lobbyists’ drift towards the Conservative party already started more than a year ago in the summer of 2023, as reflected in lobby firms’ hiring decisions of former staffers.
This is around the same time as Liberal polling numbers started taking their as-of-yet uninterrupted nosedive. (These data are not as frequently updated, so the series in Exhibit 4 ends in May of 2024 for now.)
Exhibit 4 again may not look dramatic visually (again, partly because its axis is scaled to match the exhibits below), but its significance becomes clearer when seen in contrast to what the same data looked like during the last few electoral cycles.
Exhibit 5 shows the same data on lobby-firms hiring around the 2015, 2019 and 2021 elections. (The 2011 data wasn’t adequately cleaned yet at the time of this writing.) An obvious and unsurprising scramble to hire former Liberal staffers can be seen a few month after the Liberal victory in the 2015 election, with external consulting firms hiring a bout of former liberal staffers, and letting go of a significant number of conservative ones. In 2019, the Trudeau government secured a resounding victory and this was reflected in the stability we see in lobby-firms’ hiring before and after that election. In contrast, the 24-month window around the 2021 election looks considerably noisier already, possibly partly due to how Covid impacted the lobbying landscape at the time.
Whatever one makes of these patterns, they do not seem to bode well for the current Liberal government.
This concludes today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics.