September's Ottawa Lobbying Update #1
September's Ottawa Lobbying Update #1
last month's most lobbying-active sectors and organizations
Each month, Queen Street Analytics publishes four reports on the government relations landscape in Ottawa, analyzing noteworthy patterns across (#1) the most lobbying-active sectors and organizations, (#2) the most lobbied government institutions and public officials (DPOHs), (#3) the most active lobby-firms and lobbyist-consultants, and (#4) the most lobbied-on and discussed subjects, themes, issues and topics. Our approach is not journalistic and we don’t report on anecdotes or on the news cycle. Instead, we use statistical and machine-learning enabled analytics to uncover patterns, trends, and opportunities, to allow our subscribers to better navigate the government relations landscape.
It is September 7th, and in today’s newsletter#1, we start with a brief look at July’s lobbying activity in the aggregate, and then focus on which sectors and which organizations did the most lobbying for the month.
CliffsNotes version:
last month saw lower-than-usual lobbying activity overall (adjusted for seasonal variation) but this deviation was slight
there were 11 sectors with unusually high lobbying activity last month, incl. environmental organizations and the metal mining industry
there were 5 sectors with unusually low lobbying activity last month, incl. crop production and poultry farming
15 organizations with unusually high lobbying activity, incl. the Breakfast Club Of Canada, Davie Canada Yard Inc, and Vale Canada as the biggest outliers
1. July 2023: the Aggregate View
The summer months of July and August are usually quiet on Queen Street (as are December/January), and this July was no different, with 1,339 lobbying communications reported (as of September 6th), relative to 3,460 in May and 2,542 in June. Exhibit 1 shows this year’s July-dip is in line with historical averages: relative to time-trends and adjustment terms for calendar month, July’s overall lobbying activity (marked by the red X in below chart) was somewhat below expected, but within range of normal proceedings.
2. Sectoral Breakdowns
To measure “unexpected” lobby-activity across the 150+ sectors on LobbyIQ’s data-platform, we take the entire 15 years of lobbying data, and regress the number of communications by sector-month on a time-polynomial, as well as (150x12) sector-specific monthly adjustment terms. (Making these sector-specific allows seasonal fluctuations to vary by sector, e.g. in construction or higher education.) Exhibit 2shows the excess (over/under predicted) communications in July 2023, ranked by sector. Most sectors saw very close to the predicted amount of lobbying communications, but there are noteworthy outliers in both tails.
Outlier Sectors in July
Exhibit 3 below lists the top-outliers in both tails; specifically, the 16 sectors which saw lobbying activity that exceeded the predicted number of communications with government by more than +/-10. Social assistance organizations led the way, with more than 44 communications in excess of what is predicted. Other sectors with significantly higher-than expected lobbying activity are: universities, environmental organizations, metal mining, Telecomms, agri-manufacturing, truck transportation, ship and motor vehicle manufacturing, power generation and oil and gas. In contrast, the sectors that saw significantly lower-than expected lobbying activity are: non-metal and non-oil mining, general crop production, air transportation, poultry and egg production, and credit unions.
None of the deviations from trend in exhibit 3 are very large. For context, the historical range of monthly deviations in the data goes from below -100 to above +300. This is unsurprising, July being a quiet month in Ottawa overall.
In most of the sectors in exhibit 3, higher-than-expected lobbying was driven primarily by a combination of two factors: (a) not seeing the typical drop-off in lobbying for July relative to May and June, coupled with (b) a broader 2023-uptrend in overall sectoral lobbying activity. This is visible in the figure below, a bar-chart from LobbyIQ’s sector-dashboard for metals mining, displaying the last 18 months of aggregate lobbying activity in that sector. The bar-chart displays overall more activity in 2023 relative to the ten displayed months for 2023, as well as seeing a much smaller June-to-July drop-off in 2023 than usual (and smaller than the one visible in 2022).
3. What organizations drove lobbying in July ‘23?
In some of the sectors with larger-than-expected lobbying, the excess was being driven by a single organization, or two, which may indicates a few focused lobbying campaigns in July (more on that below). A case in point is visible on Exhibit 4, from LobbyIQ’s sector-dashboard for metals mining: lobbying by Vale (partly done in-house and partly with the consultant firm PAA Advisory) can account for most of the sector’s overall expanded lobbying activity in July (with 22 lobbying-communications in July relative to a prior 12-month average of 7.5)
Similarly, the excess in lobbying by social assistance organizations was dominated by the Breakfast Club of Canada (which, Exhibit 6 shows, dominates that sector’s lobbying activity in general).
Outlier Organizations in July
Who then were the outlier organizations in July, which may indicate focused lobbying campaigns for a narrow purpose?
Exhibit 7 shows a list of all organizations with positive or negative excess lobbying activity above +/-8. The first thing to note is there are no negative outliers, indicating that the five sectors with unusually low lobbying activity (Exhibit 3 above) were driven by a sector-wide drop in lobbying activity, rather than a steep drop-off in lobbying activity by any one organization. On the higher-than-expected side, most of the outlier organizations fall in one of the sectors with unusually high lobbying activity (Exhibit 3 above).
The exceptions to this (where excess-lobbying by one organization was offset by generally lower lobbying in their sector) are Armatec Survivability (defense sector), the Canadian Cattle Association, the BC Maritime Employers Association, and the Canadian Nurses Association.
For those subscribers who want to take a deeper dive into the data to find out more about these individual lobbying campaigns, or to take a closer look at specific sectors, hop over to LobbyIQ for one of their amazing data-subscriptions.
Next week, we will take a closer look at which of the 160+ government institutions on LobbyIQ’s data-platform saw unusual lobbying activity in July.