May’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
May’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
Arcelormittal Dofasco, Agnico Eagle Mines, Chicken Farmers Of Canada, the First Nations Finance Authority, and Communitech Corporation, Finest Sausage & Meat
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 May
Unusually active sector-agency pairs in May
Organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in May
Highlights:
May was a busy month, but in line with historical lobbying activity around this time of year
There were 21 unusually busy sectors in terms of lobbying activity, with Metals manufacturing and Mining leading the charge
There were 59 organizations with unusually active lobbying activity in May, with stand-outs including Arcelormittal Dofasco, Agnico Eagle Mines, Chicken Farmers Of Canada, the First Nations Finance Authority, and Communitech Corporation
There were 15 sector-agency pairs with unusually active lobbying activity in May. In half of these, the “agency” was the House of Commons, i.e. industry reps had an unusual number of meetings with MPs.
57 organizations registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time this May.
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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 high in May, with roughly 3,250 communication filings, compared to 3,800 in May 2023 and around 3,250 in April 2024.
2. Unusual Lobbying Activity
What industries were the main source of communications activity in May? 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 May?
Exhibit 2 displays 21 sectors with “Excess Comms > 16” (on the left). Exhibit 3 breaks these out, sorted by their relative deviation (Excess/Comms). As a result, the two largest absolute outliers on the left of Exhibit 2 (E-NGOs and mining companies) are only the third and second largest relative outliers in Exhibit 3 because they have high baseline lobbying-activity.
The biggest relative outlier in lobbying activity in May was the Metal manufacturing sector. This can be seen in a more visually striking way on LobbyIQ’s Metal manufacturing dashboard, from which Exhibit 3 shows the aggregate 18-month timeline.
Such outlier activity may sometimes be the result of an industry-wide “lobby-day” or it may 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 organization-exhibit to shed light on this, as can be seen in Exhibit 5, where we see Arcelormittal Dofasco, the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction, and the Canadian Steel Producers Association with highly elevated lobbying activity in May.
The following provides an overview of all organizations with elevated lobbying, across sectors.
Which particular organizations displayed unusual lobbying activity in May?
A simple prediction model on the number of filings at the organization-month-level identifies which organizations were unusually active in May, relative to their own past lobbying activity. Exhibit 6 lists 37 organizations with “Excess Comms > 7” that belong to the outlier-sectors listed in Exhibit 3. The second columns again lists the number of filed communications relative to their excess over predicted
Below, Exhibit 7 lists an additional 22 organizations with “Excess Comms > 7” that did not belong to sectors that displayed 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 15 sector-agency pairs with unusual lobbying activities in May, specifically those pairs with 9+ more meetings than predicted by past activity.
About half the pairs in Exhibit 8 were drive by communications with MPs (aka the House of Commons) and Senators, which typically either signifies lobbying on more legislative issues than regulatory issues (unless it’s driven by industry associations’ lobby-days). For a look at key legislative legislative and regulatory developments in May, see here:
and here:
In next week’s edition, when we look at the most lobbied MPs, Senators, and office holders in May.
4. New Organizations Entering the GR Landscape
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 about 60 new organizations enter the lobbying-realm.
Exhibit 9 below lists the 57 organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in May 2024.
For a comparison to last month, see here:
This concludes today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics. In the next edition, we look at the office holders and MPs that were most lobbied in May/2024.