October's Ottawa Lobbying Update #2
October's Ottawa Lobbying Update #2
last month's most lobbied public office holders and institutions, and who lobbied them
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, themes, issues and topics. Our approach is not journalistic. We use statistical and machine-learning enabled analytics to uncover patterns, trends, and opportunities, giving our subscribers an enhanced toolkit to navigate the government relations landscape.
Today, it’s time for October’s newsletter#2 where we look at the federal government institutions and public office holders that saw unusual communications activity last month (and which organizations and sectors drove those communications).1
CliffsNotes version:
Hannah Wilson and Bud Sambasivam at Finance Canada topped August’s list of 18 public office holders with an unusually high number of lobby communication filings
Finance Canada and ISED topped the list of institutions that saw unusually high meetings activity
two Foreign Affairs related government institutions were among the least lobbied during the month of August, taking no meetings at all
Telecommunications firms’ meetings with ISED, and Banking and Pipeline firms’ meetings with Finance Canada were among a dozen unusually active sector-institution pairs
Pembina’s meetings with Finance Canada, and Rogers’, Telesat’s and Bell’s meetings with ISED were among 21 organization-institution pairs with unusually high meetings activity
1. Most Lobbied Civil Servants in August
Let’s begin with a look at August’s most lobbied designated public office holders (DPOHs) in Exhibit 1.
In July, ISED’s Bianca Hossain topped this list, but for the month of August she is at the bottom of the list. Topping the list are Hannah Wilson and Bud Sambasivam, two DPOHs from Finance Canada that were not on July’s list. Indeed, Exhibit 2 confirms a large increase in meetings of these two at the top of August’s DPOH-breakdown on LobbyIQ’s institutions-dashboard for Finance Canada: 32 filings vs a twelve-month average of 12.1 for Hannah Wilson, and 27 relative to 19.8 for Bud Sambasivam (the numbers are slightly higher than our Exhibit 2 because Lobby IQ’s numbers include another 2 weeks worth of late filings we do not yet have access to).
Overall, August’s list of DPOHs with the most meetings is dominated by Finance Canada and ISED. For a comparison to last month’s top-DPOHs, see here:
The majority of the most lobbied DPOHs are at the mid-level of seniority, Policy Advisors and Senior Policy Advisors such as Hannah Wilson, Christophe Cinqmars-Viau, Ben Chin, Anton Lori, Connor Macdonald, Tony Maas, Darren Hall, Samir Kassam, Joshua Swift, Bianca Hossain.
However, several higher-seniority individuals also make the list, including three Policy Directors (Bud Sambasivam at FIN, Ian Foucher at ISED, and Boyan Gerasimov, also at ISED), and four Assistant Deputy Ministers (Eric Dagenais at ISED, Erin O'Brien at NRCan, Grahame Johnson at FIN, and Samuel Millar, also at FIN) .
2. Breakdown by Government Institution
Which government institutions saw unusual amounts of lobbying in August?
To identify these breakout institutions, we use a dataset that aggregates filings by institution-month, and run the same prediction model, with a separate shifter for each institution (creating a panel of 160 monthly-frequency time-series).
Exhibit 3 displays all institutions with an absolute (i.e. positive or negative) break-out from expected filings over 12 in August 2023. This is the Excess-column), rank-ordered. The ExcessP-column is similar but adjusted to account for the number of DPOHs that attended a meeting (i.e. accounting for both the quantity and size of meetings).
Overall, Exhibit 1 already suggested ISED and Finance Canada would top the list, and this is indeed the case. Other heavily lobbied institutions include Environment and Climate Change Canada, and NRCan. None of the breakouts from trend (i.e. the Excess values) in Exhibit 3 are particularly large by historical standards.. For context, the biggest deviations in the data reach to -700 and +700 for the House of Commons, and to -130 and +240 for other government branches. (Many of the big deviations occurred during Covid.) This is unsurprising insofar as August is a quiet month for lobbying in Ottawa overall.
In most of the institutions in Exhibit 3, breakout lobbying communications were coming from several sectors at the same time. This can be seen in Exhibit 4, a breakdown of the sectors with higher-than-average lobbying of Finance Canada in August ISED , taken from LobbyIQ’s institutions-dashboard for Finance Canada. What this exhibit shows in the “movers table” is that there was a large and diverse set of sectors who had higher-than-usual lobby communication filings with Finance Canada last month (i.e. they were above their twelve-month average).
This kind of broad-based increase in communication with an institution usually indicates that the policy issues under the purview of this specific government institution were more relevant than usual, often because specific policy initiates.
While Finance Canada’s higher-than-usual lobbying appears to have been driven by many sectors, there are usually some institutions where just one or two sectors (or even just one or two individual organizations) are behind an observed breakout in lobbying communication filings. Those cases are particularly interesting because they may indicate more focused narrowly-targeted lobbying campaigns. Let’s therefore have a closer look at those.
3. August’s Institution-Sector Outliers
Which institutions saw unusually high lobbying activity accounted for by only one or two sectors’ lobbying? To answer this question, we run our workhorse model of lobbying at the level of the institution-sector pair (roughly 1 million observations across 15 years of monthly data).
Exhibit 5 confirms that August’s excess lobbying (i.e. institutions listed in Exhibit 3) tended on average to be fairly broad-based in the sense that none of the pair-specific Excess-numbers in Exhibit 5 really come close to fully accounting for any one sector’s aggregated Excess displayed in Exhibit 3. However, a few interesting pairs do come close, including Telecommunications firms’ meetings with ISED, Banking and Pipeline transportation firms’ meetings with Finance Canada, and Electric power generation firms’ meetings with NRCan.
Comparing Exhibit 5 to last month (where it was Exhibit 6), we see some continuity but also some significant change. August’s increased meetings in the Telecommunications-ISED, Banking-FIN, and Pipeline-FIN pairs are all continuations from already higher-than usual activity in July; so is Newspaper publishers’ continued increased meetings with Canadian Heritage, presumably in relation to Bill C-18. In contrast, Electric power generation firms’ meetings with NRCan are new in August, and several pairs that were prominent in July have disappeared from August’s list. See here for a comparison:
4. August’s Institution-Organization Outliers
To identify potential narrowly-targeted lobbying campaigns, we go beyond institution-sector pairs and run our outlier analysis at the more fine-grained institution-organization pair (5+ million observations across 15 years of monthly data). Exhibit 6 displays the outlier pairs that get flagged by this exercise.
Last month’s newsletter #2 showed the Breakfast Club of Canada dominating House of Commons outliers in July, with 32 excess meetings, but that came way down in August. Among the other outliers, ISED’s unusually high number of meetings with Rogers Communications Inc. is a continuation from July, but Rogers is now joined by two other Telecoms, namely Telesat and Bell, potentially indicating some bigger at play in this sector.
Other noteworthy institution-organizations pairs that were continuations of an already higher than expected meeting frequency in July include Global Affairs Canada (GAC)’s meetings with Davie Canada Yard and Transport Canada (TC)’s meetings with the Western Canadian Shippers' Coalition are.
An interesting new outlier-pair is Pembina’s meetings with Finance Canada, likely related to a new round of government loans for to the Transmountain pipeline.
Subscribers who want to take a more detailed dive into the data for themselves are encouraged to check out LobbyIQ’s data-dashboards and custom query features.
Next week, we will take a closer look at August’s noteworthy movements among Ottawa’s major lobby firms.
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 3 newsletters in October consider the “last month” to be August, and the 4th newsletter (published at the end of October) considers the “last month” to be September. Restated, the data landscape for August is analyzed in September’s newsletter #4 plus October’s newsletters #1-#3.