July’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
July’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
Electricity Canada, Vale, Canadian Medical Association, Council for a Secure Energy Future, Pan American Silver Corp.
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 July
Organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in July
Highlights:
July’s lobbying activity was in line with the historical average, with just over 1,500 filed meetings, about 650 less than in June 2024, but slightly more than in July of 2023
Five sectors stood out as unusually busy in terms of lobbying activity in July, including the Electric power generation, Utilities (integrated) and Mining (metal ore)
There were 16 organizations with unusually active lobbying activity in July, including Electricity Canada, Vale Canada and the Canadian Medical Association
Despite the overlap muted lobbying activity, a whopping 59 organizations registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time this July, preparing for what looks set to be a busy GR campaign season this coming fall. New registrants included the Council for a Secure Energy Future and Pan American Silver Corp.
Queen Street Analytics provides a high-level overview of federal lobbying developments. If your organization has more specific needs, e.g.:
a full view of GR activity including lobby-communications, submitted briefs, witness appearances and regulatory commenting
creating custom-dashboards to track GR activity on specific issues
accessing dedicated breakdowns of GR activity by sector, organization, or subject
receiving weekly email updates on GR developments by industry, and weekly GR insider reports on changes in the GR landscape, including new relationships, changes in GR-teams, and new organizations entering the GR landscape
creating stakeholder presentations to compare your organization’s GR activity to a selected set of peers
historical snapshots to gauge trends,
consider subscribing to LobbyIQ’s GR-tracking package.
1. The 30,00 Foot View
LobbyIQ’s big picture dashboard (Exhibit 1) shows that Ottawa’s federal lobbying activity in July was in line with the historical average: with just over 1,500 communication filings last month looked almost identical to July 2023, and was typically muted compared to most other months of the year.
2. Unusual Lobbying Activity
What industries were the main source of communications activity in July? 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 July?
Exhibit 2 displays 5 sectors with “Excess Comms > 16” (on the left). Exhibit 3 breaks these out, sorted by their relative deviation (Excess/Comms). As a result of the relative sorting, the two largest absolute outliers on the left of Exhibit 2 (universities and E-NGOs) are only the third and fifth largest relative outliers in Exhibit 3 because of their high baseline lobbying-activity.
The biggest relative outliers in lobbying activity in July were the Electric power generation and Utilities sectors. This can be seen in a more visually striking way on LobbyIQ’s sector dashboards, for example on the Utilities 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. The following provides an overview of all organizations with elevated lobbying in July, across sectors.
Which particular organizations displayed unusual lobbying activity in July?
A simple prediction model on the number of filings at the organization-month-level identifies which organizations were unusually active in July, relative to their own past lobbying activity. The top of Exhibit 5 lists the organizations with “excess comms” that belong to the outlier-sectors listed in Exhibit 3 (down to the mining sector). The bottom part of the exhibit (starting with Aerospace) 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 6 below lists the 59 organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in July 2024, including their external representation if they chose to have any.
For a comparison to last month, see here:
This concludes today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics.