September's Ottawa Lobbying Update #2
September's Ottawa Lobbying Update #2
last month's most lobbied public office holders and institutions, and who lobbied them
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, giving our subscribers an enhanced toolkit to navigate the government relations landscape.
It’s September 14th, and in newsletter#2 for the month we investigate the federal government institutions and public office holders that saw unusual communications activity last month (and which organizations and sectors drove those communications).1
CliffsNotes version:
Bianca Hossain (Policy Advisor, ISED), Thomas Gagne (Director of Defence Procurement, DND), and Leslie Church (Chief of Staff, FIN) were among the 16 DPOHs with an unusually high number of meetings
ISED and NRCan were among the 11 institutions with unusually high communications filings
Industry Canada was one of five institutions with unusually low communications filings
Newspaper publishers’ lobbying of Canadian Heritage (PCH) was among 25 unusually active sector-institution pairs
Rogers’ meetings with ISED were among 22 unusually active organization-institution pairs
1. Most Lobbied Civil Servants in July
Let’s begin with a look at July’s most lobbied designated public office holders (DPOHs) in Exhibit 1 below.
The majority of the most lobbied DPOHs are at the mid-level of seniority, i.e. Policy Advisors and Senior Policy Advisors. These include: Bianca Hossain (ISED), Christophe Cinqmars-Viau (FIN), Connor Macdonald (HoC), Joshua Swift (ECCC), Blake Oliver (FIN), Ben Chin (PMO), Sandenga Yeba (HC), Nina Lothian (ECCC), and Brian Mackay (PCH).
But several higher-seniority DPOHs also make July’s list, including Thomas Gagne (Director of Defence Procurement, DND), Leslie Church (Chief of Staff, FIN), Simon Kyle Harrietha (Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Parliamentary Affairs, NRCan), and Jason Easton (Chief of Staff, GAC).
Taking both the number of meetings and the seniority of the DPOHs into account, ISED stands out in July’s data because its Deputy Minister and Senior Associate DM each took more than ten meetings. Even ISED’s Minister had the highest number of meetings of any minister, with nine.
Exhibit 2 takes a deeper dive into ISED’ meetings involving the three senior officials. We can see most meetings were attended by only one of the three, which in turn means makes for a pretty large number of 32 meetings that involved at least one of the institution’s three most senior officials in July.
To generate your own breakdowns of lobbying activity by DPOH, hop over to LobbyIQ’s and check out their custom query features.
2. Breakdown by Government Institution
Which government institutions saw unusual amounts of lobbying in July?
Exhibit 3 displays a ranking of institutions by their excess (i.e. over- or under-predicted) number of communications in July 2023.2 As usual, the majority of institutions saw something close to the predicted amount of lobbying communications, but as always, there are also noteworthy outliers in the tails.
Exhibit 4 lists the institutions that are the outliers outliers in both tails. Excess in column 1 denotes an excess (+/- relative to predicted) number of meetings. ExcessP in column 2 is similar but adjusted to account for the number of DPOHs that attended a meeting (i.e. accounting for both the quantity and size of meetings).
None of the deviations from trend in Exhibit 3 are particularly large. For context, the biggest deviations in the data reach to -700 and +700 for the House of Commons, and to -130 and +240 for other government branches. (A big chunk of these deviations occurred during Covid.) This is unsurprising insofar as July is a quiet month for lobbying in Ottawa overall.
In most of the institutions in Exhibit 4, higher-than-expected lobbying was coming from several sectors at the same time. This can be seen in Exhibit 5, a breakdown of the sectors lobbying ISED (Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada), taken from LobbyIQ’s institutions-dashboard for ISED.3 What this exhibit shows is that excess lobbying of ISED was not driven by any one sector in particular but instead was driven by a wide range of lobbying activities across sectors. (This is already evident in Exhibit 2.)
This kind of broad-based higher lobbying of a specific government institution indicates that increased lobbying was likely driven by a broadly higher relevance of the policy issues under the purview of a particular government institution.
Nonetheless, we do have some institutions where just one or two sectors (or, as we investigate later, even just one or two individual organizations) were behind the unusual amount of lobbying. Those cases are interesting because they can potentially indicate more focused narrowly-targeted lobbying campaigns.
4. “Odd Couples” - July’s Institution-Sector Outliers
So, which institutions saw unusually high lobbying activity accounted for by only one or two sectors’ lobbying? To answer this question, we run our workhorse model of lobbying at the level of the institution-sector pair (roughly 1 million observations across 15 years of data) instead of aggregating all lobbying to the institution (as we did for Exhibit 3).
Exhibit 6 shows that excess lobbying of the House of Commons and ISED was indeed pretty broad-based, i.e. driven by a multitude of sectors all lobbying these two government branches more than usual. In contrast, the excess lobbying of Finance Canada (FIN), Global Affairs Canada (GAC), Health Canada (HC), Canadian Heritage (PCH), and Transport Canada (TC) were all driven by just one or two sectors.
In some cases, these outlier pairs match up with stories that have been prominent in the news cycle recently. Increased lobbying of Canadian Heritage (PCH) by the broadcast media and newspaper publisher sectors for instance seems clearly related to Bill C-18. In other cases, the drivers of excess lobbying are less obvious. It seems likely, for example, that the excess lobbying of Finance Canada (FIN) by the Banking sector has different causes than its excess lobbying by the Pipeline transportation sector.
5. “Odd Couples #2” - July’s Institution-Organization Outliers
To identify potential narrowly-targeted lobbying campaigns, we go beyond institution-sector pairs and run our outlier analysis at the more fine-grained institution-organization pair (5+ million observations across 15 years of data). Exhibit 7 displays the outlier pairs that get flagged by this exercise.
In the House of Commons, the overall higher level of lobbying of MPs is driven by a multitude of sectors, but the Breakfast Club of Canada does stand out with 32 excess meetings. Meetings with MPs can occur for many reasons, one of which is the committees they sit on. However, the Breakfast Club’s lobbying efforts appear very wide-ranging on this dimension as it held meetings with MPs representing a whopping 21 different committees.
Among the other outliers, ISED DPOHs had an usually high number of meetings with Rogers Communications Inc., Umicore NV/SA, Amazon Corporate LLC, and Able Innovations; Global Affairs Canada (GAC) with Davie Canada Yard Inc and with the Business Council of Canada; Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) with Pathways Alliance Inc; Health Canada (HC) with the Canadian Nurses Association; Canadian Heritage (PCH) with News Media Canada; National Defence (ND) with Armatec Survivability; Transport Canada (TC) with Fertilizer Canada and with the Western Canadian Shippers' Coalition; and, finally, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) with Davie Canada Yard Inc (which also met a lot with GAC).
Subscribers who want to take a more detailed dive into the data for themselves are encouraged to check out LobbyIQ’s data-dashboards and custom query features.
Next week, we will take a closer look at July’s noteworthy movements among Ottawa’s major lobby firms.
The lobby filings take about one month before they are close-to-completely reported, so that September is the earliest month to provide a reliable picture of July, October for August etc.
To measure “predicted” lobby-activity across the 150+ sectors on LobbyIQ’s data-platform, we take the entire 15 years of lobbying data, and run an econometric model that regresses the number of communications by institution-month on a time-polynomial, as well as (150x12) institution-specific monthly adjustment terms. Making monthly terms institution-specific allows seasonal fluctuations to vary by sector, e.g. the House of Commons typically sees a much more pronounced dip in lobbying in July than most other government institutions.
Exhibit 3 shows raw lobbying counts in July relative to raw counts in the previous 12 months, whereas exhibit 2 showed “excess” (unpredicted) lobbying activities.