April’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
April’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
Electricity Canada, Mowi, the University of BC, Manulife Financial, Canada's VC And Private Equity Association, the Canadian Media Producers; and Scale AI enters the lobbying arena
Keeping a close eye on today’s federal lobbying is the canary in the coalmine that lets us anticipate tomorrow’s legislative and regulatory changes. That is why, every month, Queen Street Analytics provides key updates on noteworthy patterns in federal lobbying activity in Ottawa.
Table of Content:
The big picture view
Unusually active sectors and organizations in April
Unusually active sector-agency pairs in April
Organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in April
Highlights:
April was busy month, compared to both March 2024 and April 2023
There were 17 unusually busy sectors in terms of lobbying activity, with Utilities and Indigenous stakeholder groups leading the charge
There were 76 organizations with unusually active lobbying activity in April, Electricity Canada, Mowi Canada (Aquaculture), the University Of BC, Manulife Financial, Canada's VC And Private Equity Association, the Canadian Media Producers Association, and Benson & Hedges (Tobacco)
There were 14 sector-agency pairs with unusually active lobbying activity in April, the majority of which involved lobby-meetings with MPs, indicating lobbying on current legislative proposals
71 organizations registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time this April. One interesting cherry-pick among these is Scale AI, the second Canadian AI company to enter the lobbying arena after Cohere took the plunge last month
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1. The 30,00 Foot View
LobbyIQ’s big picture dashboard (Exhibit 1) shows that federal lobbying activity in Ottawa was high in April, with roughly 3,150 communication filings, compared to 2,400 in March 2024 and 2,600 in April 2023.
2. Unusual Lobbying Activity
What industries were the main source of communications activity in April? A simple prediction model on the number of filings at the sector-level generates the deviations from trend depicted in Exhibit 2, where “Excess Comms”, are actual minus predicted filings, rank-ordered left-to-right across 150 sectors.
Which industries were outliers in April?
Exhibit 2 displays seventeen sectors with “Excess Comms > 16” (on the left). Exhibit 3 breaks these out, sorted by their relative deviation (Excess/Comms). For example, the two largest absolute outliers on the left of Exhibit 2 (E-NGOs and universities) are only the third and eight largest relative outliers in Exhibit 3 because they have the highest baseline lobbying-activity.
The biggest relative outlier in lobbying activity in April was the Utilities sector. Other unusually active sectors included (in descending order) Indigenous stakeholders, Aquaculture, Metals-mining, Health advocacy organizations, Aerospace product and parts manufacturing, Defense, Electric power generation, Crop production, Insurance, Labour organizations, Software, Business associations, Telecommunications, and Oil and gas extraction.
Which particular organizations displayed unusual lobbying activity in April?
A simple prediction model on the number of filings at the organization-month-level identifies which organizations were unusually active in April, relative to their own past lobbying activity. Exhibit 4 lists all 48 organizations with “Excess Comms > 7” that belong to April’s outlier-sectors in Exhibit 3.
Below, Exhibit 5 lists an additional 28 organizations with “Excess Comms > 7” that did not belong to the sectors that displayed unusually high lobbying activity in the aggregate.
Which Stakeholder-Agency Pairs were Unusually Active?
It’s instructive to break lobbying-activity behavior down by sector-agency pair, instead of simply by sector, as this shows both sides of the lobbying-interaction. Exhibit 6 shows sector-agency pairs with unusual lobbying activities in April, specifically those pairs with 9+ more meetings than predicted by past activity.
The most notable fact in Exhibit 6 is that it was primarily MPs (aka members of the House of Commons) that drove the excess sector-agency meetings in April, which typically signifies more lobbying on legislative issues (in this case, specifically in the House rather than the Senate) than regulatory issues, and indeed April was a busy month on the legislative front, with several important bills being considered in committee or at various reading-stage in the House. (Stay tuned for next week’s edition, when we look specifically at the most lobbied MPs and office holders in April.) For reference, see our recent issues on legislative and regulatory developments in April:
4. New Organizations Entering the GR Landscape
There are around 5,500 active federal lobby-registrations, representing around 2,500 unique organizations, with a mix of in-House registrations and registrations through external consultants. Every month, some organizations churn and about 60 new organizations enter the lobbying-realm.
Exhibit 7 below lists the 71 organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in April 2024. Each reader will have a different lens on Exhibit 7, depending on their industry and interests of focus. So we largely leave it to the reader to glean for themselves what is relevant in Exhibit 7. However, we do want to note the issue of AI. In last month’s edition, we highlighted Cohere, Canada’s most well-known AI company, being the first AI-first company that entered the lobbying arena, see here:
Lobbying by AI-first companies has potentially outsized importance at the present moment because the critical importance of this technology means that Bill C-27 (currently in committee, discussed in our April issue on legislative developments) could have potentially far-reaching consequences for Canada’ productivity malaise going forward. This month, it is Scale AI, the Canadian AI Supercluster, that is the second Canadian AI-first organization to enter the lobbying arena.
This concludes today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics. In the next edition, we look at the office holders and MPs that were most lobbied in April/2024.