April’s most in-demand office holders in Ottawa
April’s most in-demand office holders in Ottawa
Justin Trudeau, Randy Boissonnault, Julie Dabrusin, Francesco Sorbara, George Chahal, Gérard Deltell, and Paul Halucha
Lobbying is the grease that lubricates the gears of our country’s legislative and regulatory machinery, shaping the contours of laws and rules that govern the business environment. That is why Queen Street Analytics provides monthly updates on the most lobbied Ministers, MPs and civil servants, checking where the most grease is being applied.
Table of Contents:
April’s most lobbied ministers
April’s most lobbied MPs
April’s most lobbied DPOHs, by agency
For a comparison to the last issue on the same topic, see here:
Queen Street Analytics provides a monthly high-level overview of the most lobbied Ministers, MPs, and civil servants. If your organization has more specific needs, such as:
accessing data-driven recommendations on which civil servants and MPs to talk to on specific issues
measuring the effect of past GR activity on key legislation
receiving weekly email updates on who got lobbied in key agencies or on key subjects and issues
accessing breakdowns of who else is lobbying the same officials,
consider subscribing to LobbyIQ’s GR-tracking package.
1. April’s most lobbied ministers
Exhibit 1 lists the current cabinet’s ministers, with the number of meetings and communications they took in April, and the trailing twelve month (TTM) average of meetings they had in a typical month between March 2023 and March 2024.
Different parts of this table will be relevant to different readers, so this article doesn’t discuss any one minister’s meetings in detail, but some high-level observations are that Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and Randy Boissonnault each took considerably more meetings than usual in April.
2. April’s Most Lobbied MPs
In Exhibit 2, we list the MPs with the most lobby communications and meetings in April, including their riding and the committees they sit on. (TTM again reporting on the previous twelve-month average of meetings.)
April’s five busiest MPs in terms of meetings with lobbyists were Julie Dabrusin (Toronto—Danforth), Francesco Sorbara (Vaughan—Woodbridge), George Chahal (Calgary Skyview), Gérard Deltell (Louis-Saint-Laurent), and Randy Hoback (Prince Albert), each with around 30 meetings. Outside these top-five, meeting-frequency drops off considerably.
3. April’s Most Lobbied DPOHs, by Agency
In the end, the most communications by far occur at the level of the bureaucracy, with designated public office holders (DPOHs) that may not be very well-known outside the halls of power in Ottawa. Exhibit 3 lists the 30 busiest DPOHs in April, organized by their agencies. TTM reports on their previous twelve-month meetings-average (TTM) and the Rank-field ranks them according to the number of meetings taken in April.
Paul Halucha, Deputy Secretary at the Privy Council was the busiest DPOH in for the second month running, taking even more meetings than the 36 he took in March, showing his growing importance in the Privy Council.
Breaking the DPOHs down by whom they met with is too much information to fit into this newsletter format, but that information can readily be gleaned from LobbyIQ’s dashboards for individual DPOHs.
Exhibit 4 for example shows a snapshot for Jason Easton, who has been taking on an increasingly more prominent role in the Prime Minister’s Office.
For readers who need to know the most important DPOHs to get in touch with on a specific issue, LobbyIQ’s “who to talk to” recommender-engine offers rich capabilities to guide outreach. Or users can simply generate breakdowns of the most lobbied officials by institution, any of the lobby-register’s 53 subject-categories, or any custom-generated issue. Below, we attach 3 such breakdowns: the most lobbied DPOHs in ECCC, the most lobbied DPOHs on the subject of mining, and the most lobbied DPOHs on the custom-issue of “Bills C-26 and C-27” (the cybersecurity and AI bills).
This concludes today’s issue on April’s most lobbied ministers, MPs, and public office holders.
Next week, we dive into our review of May’s GR landscape.