August’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
August’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
Arcelormittal Dofasco, the Canadian Steel Producers, Canadian Nuclear Association, the Center for Commercialization Of Regenerative Medicine. Vector Institute joins the lobbying fray
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 August
Organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in August
Highlights:
August’s lobbying activity was muted, with only 1,300 communication filings
Four sectors stood out as unusually busy in terms of lobbying activity in August, including Metal manufacturing, Retail (driven by Walmart), and Crop production
There were 14 organizations with unusually active lobbying activity in August, including Arcelormittal Dofasco, the Canadian Steel Producers, Canadian Nuclear Association, the Center for Commercialization Of Regenerative Medicine, the National Association of Women and the Law
Despite the overall muted lobbying activity, 52 organizations registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time this August. One noteworthy entrant into the lobbying fray was the Vector Institute, arguably Canada’s second-most important onAI entity (with Cohere having registered for the first time in March this year)
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creating custom-dashboards to track GR activity on specific issues
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For a comparison to last month’s issue on the lobbying landscape, see here:
1. The 30,00 Foot View
The data posted in the lobby registry as of today suggests that August was a very quiet month on the lobbying front. It is possible that we will be surprised by a one-week delayed data dump on the registry side. However, considering that July + August 2024 adds up to almost exactly the same number of communication filings as July + August 2023 (just over 3,000 in both windows), we are assuming that the August data is pretty much complete, and conclude that August was indeed a fairly quiet month in Ottawa. Perhaps this is a sign that we are entering a lame duck session, where the current government is not in a position where we can expect major developments on either the legislative or regulatory front, and hence there is a reduced need for lobbying?
2. Unusual Lobbying Activity
What industries were the main source of communications activity in August? 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 August?
Exhibit 2 displays 4 sectors with “Excess Comms > 12” (on the left). Exhibit 3 breaks these out, sorted by their relative deviation (Excess/Comms).
The biggest relative outliers in lobbying activity in August was Metals manufacturing sectors. This can be seen in a more visually striking way on LobbyIQ’s sector dashboards, for example on the metals manufacturing sector dashboard, from which Exhibit 4 shows the aggregate 18-month timeline.
Outlier activity as in Exhibit 4 can sometimes flag regulatory or legislative developments that drive players in an industry to engage in elevated lobbying activity. For example, Exhibit 5, from LobbyIQ's Metals manufacturing dashboard, shows that within metals manufacturing, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, the Canadian Steel Producers Association, and the Aluminum Association of Canada all had elevated lobbying activities in August.
The following provides an overview of all organizations with elevated lobbying in August, across all sectors.
Which particular organizations displayed unusual lobbying activity in August?
A simple prediction model on the number of filings at the organization-month-level identifies which organizations were unusually active in August, relative to their own past lobbying activity. The top three sectors in Exhibit 6 list the organizations with “excess comms” that belong to the outlier-sectors listed in Exhibit 3. Below that, the exhibit lists other organizations with excess comms. The second column again lists the number of filed communications relative to their excess over predicted (Comms / Excess).
3. New Organizations Entering the GR Landscape
On average, 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 some new organizations enter the federal lobbying-realm.
Exhibit 7 below lists the 52 organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in August 2024, including their external representation if they chose to have any.
In March, we reported that Cohere, Canada’s foremost AI company, had finally joined the lobbying arena to articulate its position regarding Bill C-27, which was referred to committee in April 2023, and has been stuck there since then. In August, we now see the Vector Institute, arguably Canada’s second-most important “AI entity”, joining Cohere in the lobbying fray.
This concludes today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics.