June’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
June’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
Cruise Lines International, Lehigh Hanson Materials, Canadian Produce Marketing Association, University Of Manitoba, Michelin, National Association of Women and the Law, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
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 June
Unusually active sector-agency pairs in June
Organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in June
Highlights:
June was a relatively quiet month, with fewer meetings than in any of the first five months of the year, and about 600 fewer meetings than in June of 2023
There were 7 unusually busy sectors in terms of lobbying activity, including the cruise lines and cement sectors
There were 29 organizations with unusually active lobbying activity in June, with stand-outs including Cruise Lines International Association, Lehigh Hanson Materials, and the Canadian Produce Marketing Association
There were 7 sector-agency pairs with unusually active lobbying activity in June.
39 organizations registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time this June.
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1. The 30,00 Foot View
LobbyIQ’s big picture dashboard (Exhibit 1) shows that federal lobbying activity in Ottawa was muted in June, with roughly 2,200 communication filings, compared to 2,800 in June 2023 and around 3,400 in May 2024.
2. Unusual Lobbying Activity
What industries were the main source of communications activity in June? 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 June?
Exhibit 2 displays 7 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 crop producers) are only the fifth and seventh largest relative outliers in Exhibit 3 because they have high baseline lobbying-activity.
The biggest relative outlier in lobbying activity in June was the Cruise Lines sector. This can be seen in a more visually striking way on LobbyIQ’s Cruise Lines sector dashboard, from which Exhibit 3 shows the aggregate 18-month timeline. Obviously, there is not a lot of lobbying activity by cruise lines in usual times. (In fact, this newsletter has never once had occasion to even mention the cruise lines sector before today.)
Outlier activity as in exhibit 4 can sometimes be the result of an industry-wide “lobby-day” or it can flag regulatory or legislative developments that drive players in an industry to engage in elevated lobbying activity. Each of LobbyIQ’s sector-dashboards has an exhibit to shed light on this, as can be seen in Exhibit 5, where we see Heidelberg Materials, Cement Association of Canada, and CGC Inc. jointly driving the Cement sector’s unusually high lobbying activity in June.
The following provides an overview of all organizations with elevated lobbying, across sectors.
Which particular organizations displayed unusual lobbying activity in June?
A simple prediction model on the number of filings at the organization-month-level identifies which organizations were unusually active in June, relative to their own past lobbying activity. Exhibit 6 lists the organizations with “Excess Comms > 7” that belong to the outlier-sectors listed in Exhibit 3. The second column again lists the number of filed communications relative to their excess over predicted
Below, Exhibit 7 additionally lists organizations with “Excess Comms > 7” that belong to other sectors (which did not display unusually high lobbying activity in the aggregate).
Which Stakeholder-Agency Pairs were Unusually Active?
It’s instructive to break lobbying-activity behavior down by sector-agency pair, instead of simply by sector, as this shows both sides of the lobbying-interaction. Exhibit 8 shows 7 sector-agency pairs with unusual lobbying activities in June, specifically those pairs with 9+ more meetings than predicted by past activity.
At the top of the list is Canadian universities’ meetings with Immigration Canada. We also see the Performing Arts sector engaging with Finance Canada and the Prime Minister’s Office. Meanwhile, Rail and Pharma companies had an unusually big number of meetings with MPs (aka House of Commons) and Senators, which typically signifies lobbying on more legislative issues rather than regulatory or program-related issues. For a look at key legislative and regulatory developments in June, see here:
and here:
4. 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 lobbying-realm.
Exhibit 9 below lists the 39 organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in June 2024.
For a comparison to last month, see here:
This concludes today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics.