Ottawa's most lobbied office holders and agencies in November
Ottawa's most lobbied office holders and agencies in November
Francesco Sorbara, RNNR and ECCC, Canadian Heritage (PCH), and Google vs the Canadian legacy media
Understanding the government relations landscape entails knowing which government agencies and civil servants are in the highest demand, and by which stakeholders. That is the topic of today’s issue, for the month of November.
CliffsNotes version:
The over 4,000 communication filings in November amounted to just over 3,000 actual separate meetings once we clean up duplicate filings.
24% of all November meetings involved an MP, and 16% involved an ADM or higher-ranking civil servant.
After three months of stability, November saw lots of reshuffling among the leaderboard of most lobbied public office holders, with several MPs taking lots of meetings, incl. Francesco Sorbara of Vaughan—Woodbridge topping the leaderboard, having taken 45 meetings with registered lobbyists in November.
November’s biggest outlier agency was Environment and Climate Change (ECCC), with 100 meetings more than expected.
Google and News Media Canada (the national association of the Canadian news media industry) had a tussle at Canadian Heritage (PCH); the poultry and egg industry descended in force on the Senate; and something is cooking for BlackBerry at the Prime Minister’s Office
For a comparison to the October data, see here (don’t be thrown off by the title):
1. Most Lobbied Civil Servants in November
Before diving into any analytics on the meetings taken by each public office holder and agency, we clean up duplicates filings. Duplicate filings arise mechanically (when multiple registered lobbyists attend the same meeting but are obliged to file separately) or unintentionally by human error (when the same lobbyist files twice, which some are prone to do repeatedly in the data).
There were almost exactly 4,000 communication filings in November, but after cleaning up duplicates these amounted to just over 3,000 actual separate meetings once we clean up duplicate filings, implying filings over-count meetings by almost one-third in November. 24% of all November meetings involved an MP. 16% of all November meetings involved an ADM or higher-ranking Civil Servant.
Exhibit 1 starts with a look at November’s 25 most lobbied public office holders (DPOHs), with their number of meetings listed, as well as the institution they represent and title they hold (Readers can find the institutional abbreviations here):
Francesco Sorbara (House of Commons), Andrew Bevan (FIN), Ben Chin (PMO), Brian Mackay (PCH), Christophe Cinqmars-Viau (FIN), Paul Halucha (PCO), Gerrard Deltell (House of Commons), Joshua Swift (ECCC), Adam Chambers (House of Commons), Hannah Wilson (FIN), Jeff Labonte (NRCan), Connor Macdonald (House of Commons), Steven Guilbeault (ECCC), Richard Cannings (House of Commons), Nipun Vats (ISED), Michael Brewster (ECCC), Arun Thangaraj (TC), Ted Falk (House of Commons), Michael Vandergrift (NRCan), Nina Lothian (ECCC), Jonathan Wilkinson (NRCan), Simon Kennedy (ISED), Caroline Lee (ECCC), Alexis Conrad (PCO), and Kyle Harrietta (NRCan).
After seeing a pretty stable leaderboard between August and October, the month of November saw lots of reshuffling among the leaderboard of most lobbied public office holders: Exhibit 2 shows a snapshot of the LobbyIQ meetings trajectories for Andrew Bevan (at FIN) and Brian Mackay (at PCH) that ranked them #2 and 4 on the leaderboard.
One interesting pattern on the DPOH leaderboard in November is a general up-trend in MPs taking meeting. Unusually, an MP, Francesco Sorbara of Vaughan—Woodbridge, is even topping the leaderboard, having taken a whopping 45 meetings with registered lobbyists in November. The quickest way to study the trajectory of meeting of a public office holder is to peruse LobbyIQ for the relevant agency dashboards, DPOH dashboards, or, in the case of MPs, committee dashboards.
Mr Sorbera is on the Standing Committee on Natural Resources (RNNR), and Exhibit 3 (a snapshot from LobbyIQ’s committee-dashboard for RNNR) confirms a consistent upward trend in the number of meetings he has been taking. LobbyIQ dashboards report filings, not meetings, which is why his November number slightly exceeds the number in Exhibit 1; and, of course, we can’t know from the lobby filings alone if an MP’s meetings relate to their position on a specific committee or whether they are driven by other, e.g. constituency-related, factors.
2. Communications by Government Agency
Zooming out, which government institutions saw unusual amounts of lobbying in November? To answer this question, we run a prediction model over aggregate filings at the institution-month (a panel of 160 monthly-frequency time-series), allowing for separate cyclical shifters for each institution.
Exhibit 4 displays all institutions with an unusual deviation in lobbying relative to trend of 11+ in November. The first column shows the number of unique DPOHs involved in an agency’s November meetings, and the second column shows the number of meetings relative to the number of excess (above predicted) meetings. Taking ISED as an example, this table reports that 130 unique DPOHs were involved in 287 separate meetings, which was 57 more meetings than predicted.
November’s biggest outlier agency was Environment and Climate Change (ECCC) with 99 excess meetings.
Exhibit 4 is interesting, but what we really want to know is the demand-side of these meetings, i.e., what sectors of the economy was driving them. This is what we look at next.
To break this down, we run a prediction model of lobbying on data aggregated to the agency-sector pair (roughly 1 million observations across 15 years of monthly data), and flag November’s “outlier pairs” (relative to their pair specific predicted number of meetings).
Exhibit 5 shows all instances of agency-sector pairs exhibiting at least 6+ meetings more than predicted by their usual patterns.
One interesting thing to observe in Exhibit 5 is the cases where an agency’s excess lobbying in Exhibit 4 are mostly explained by a small set of sectors in the economy. In November for example, this is the case for the Senate, where the 39 excess meetings in Exhibit 4 are full accounted for in Exhibit 5 by poultry farmers, crop producers and pharma companies (16+12+9=37).
Another interesting things to observe is that looking at communications from the lens of agencies sheds more light on what motivates some of the noteworthy industry-level lobbying patterns we observed in last week’s newsletter. For example, we saw last week that both the software industry and the newspaper industry saw unusual lobbying activity in November, and while most readers of this newsletter know that these two were connected by Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), there was nothing directly connecting these two to any (purely hypothetical) reader who was unaware of Bill C-18. In Exhibit 5, we can see this connection because software companies and newspaper companies were lobbying the same agency, Canadian Heritage (PCH).
And indeed, Exhibit 6, taken from LobbyIQ’s institutions-dashboard for PCH, shows that higher lobbying of PCH was driven by software (in this case basically Google), broadcast media, and newspaper publishers.
3. Agency-Sector-Org Outliers
We already alluded to this with the above example of the tussle around Bill-C18 at Canadian Heritage: in the same way that decomposing the data into agency-sector pairs in Exhibit 5 lets us look under the hood of the sector outliers in Exhibit 4, we can now use agency-sector-org triples to look under the hood of Exhibit 5.
To break this down, we run a prediction model of lobbying on data aggregated by the agency-sector-org triplet (5+ million observations across 15 years of monthly data), and flag November’s “outlier triplets” relative to our prediction model. Exhibit 7 displays 15 outlier triples, with 4+ more meetings than expected. The last column reports the number of columns relative to the number of excess (above predicted) meetings.
Going back to Canadian Heritage, we can can now clearly see the tussle over Bill C-18 play out between Google and News Media Canada, the national association of the Canadian news media industry. We can also see the poultry and egg industry descending on the Senate in a concerted effort; and something important is happening for Blackberry, which has had a lot of meetings with the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of late, including four separate meetings with Justin Trudeau.
Next week, we will look at the most important issues and subject-matters that dominated government communications in Ottawa in November.