November's Ottawa Lobbying Update #1
November's Ottawa Lobbying Update #1
last month's most lobbying-active sectors and organizations
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 and keywords. 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, to allow our subscribers to better navigate the government relations landscape.
In today’s November newsletter#1, we focus on the sectors and organizations that stood out in their communications and registrations activity during the month of September.1
The CliffsNotes:
There were just below 2,500 communications filings in September, around 10% more activity than predicted by our base model
Universities, Charitable organizations and Telecoms were among 14 sectors with unusually high lobbying activity
Telecoms was one of several sectors were higher lobbying was pervasive across many organizations, while Charitable and Labour organizations were amongst several sectors where unusually high lobbying activity could be wholly accounted for by focused communications campaigns by one or two organizations
There were around 30 organizations with focused communications campaigns last month, including Saskatchewan Polytechnic, Imagine Canada, Environmental Defense Fund, the Air Line Pilots Association, Armatec Survivability, Tourmaline Oil Corp, Alstom Transport, and Mowi Aquaculture
There were 166 new (not simply renewed) registrations in September and as of Nov 5th, there were already 229 new registrations in October
There were 23 organizations with 3+ new registrations in September and October, led by the Chamber of Marine Commerce, the Forest Products Association of Canada, and Windmill Microlending
For comparison, check out October’s newsletter#1 here:
1. Which Sectors Saw Unusual Lobbying Activity in September 2023?
September saw just below 2,500 communications filings in September, around 10% more than predicted by a simple model that predicts total filings with linear trends and calendar-month cyclical shifters. Behind this generally higher activity, there were several outlier sectors which saw unusually high lobbying activity.
To identify these breakout sectors, we count filings by sector-month-pair, and run a prediction model with separate shifters for each sector (creating a panel of 148 sector-specific monthly time-series). Exhibit 1 charts the difference between actual and predicted number of filings in September, rank-ordered left-to-right across the 148 sectors. The biggest positive breakout is +80 more communication filings than predicted (far left). Negative outliers reflect sectors with unusually muted activity.
There are 14 sectors with unexpectedly high lobbying (Excess Communications > 18). Exhibit 2 lists these outliers which are led by Universities, Charitable organizations, Telecommunications and Environmental groups.
Many of the breakout lobbying-patterns in Exhibit 2 will be driven by the focused communication campaigns of just one or two organizations in that sector.
The organization clusters on LobbyIQ’s sector-dashboards provide a quick gauge for flagging breakout lobbying campaigns by organizations within a sector. For example, Exhibit 3 shows the organization-cluster on LobbyIQ’s Universities dashboard, showing Saskatchewan Polytechnic as a big driver, and Exhibit 4 shows the organization-cluster on LobbyIQ’s defense-sector dashboard, showing Armatec Survivability as a big driver of overall communications activity.
2. Organizations’ Communications Campaigns
To be more systematic in identifying what may be focused lobbying campaigns by individual organizations, we fan the communications-data out into a panel of several thousand organization-specific monthly time-series, and look for September’s breakouts from the predicted number of communications at the organization-level.
Many of the sectors with unexpectedly high communications in September (Exhibit 2) can be accounted for by focused communication campaigns by one or two organizations.
Exhibit 5 lists thirty organizations that had at least nine monthly communications more than predicted by our model (Excess>9), sorted by sector as in Exhibit 2. The Comms-column shows the number of communication-filings, and the Excess column shows that number’s deviation from the organization’s expected (i.e. predicted) amount of filings.
In some sector, e.g. universities, the sector-level excess cannot be fully accounted for by focused communication campaigns. In other words, the excess communications of Saskatchewan Polytechnic and the U15-Group (54+12) are not enough to account for the 88 overall excess communications for Universities displayed in Exhibit 2. Consistent with that, Exhibit 3 shows that elevated communications activity was pretty pervasive in the Universities sector in September.
In other sectors such as Labor organizations, however, the Airline Pilots and Operating Engineers’ communications activities can fully account for the sector-level bump displayed in Exhibit 2.
3. Registrations
There were also a number of organizations with unusually high numbers of registrations since September, although this always needs to be taken with a grain of salt because some lobby-firms may be in a habit to split a client-relationship across several consultants, whilst other firms don’t, resulting in mechanically higher or lower registrations at the client level as a function of their chosen lobby-firm. With that caveat, Exhibit 6 shows a ranking of the organization with the highest number of new registrations in September and October (NewReg column), broken out into registrations with an external consultant vs in-House registrations.
Subscribers who want to take a deeper dive into these data are referred to LobbyIQ’s platform, which offers data and software solutions for GR professionals.
Next week, we will take a close look at which government institutions saw unusually high lobbying communications activity directed their way in September.
Lobbying communication filings need to be reported to the government by the 15th of the next month. Civil servants then take a few days to enter those filings into the public record. By the end of a month, the previous month’s filings are approximately complete. Given this cadence, Queen Street Analytics’ first 2 newsletters in November consider the “last month” to be September, and the 3rd and 4th newsletter switch to considering “last month” to be October. Restated, the data landscape for GR activity in September is analyzed in October’s newsletters #3 and #4 plus November’s newsletters #1-#2.