March’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
March’s lobbying landscape in Ottawa
Aerospace Industries, Heidelberg Materials, Telesat, Novo Nordisk Canada, and Canadian Pacific Railway have busy months, Cohere enters the lobbying arena.
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
Unusually active sector-agency pairs
Organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time
Highlights:
March was a relatively quiet month as far as federal lobbying activity goes, with around 2,300 communication filings in total
There were 8 unusually busy sectors in terms of lobbying activity, including the Aerospace and cement sectors, as well as Indigenous stakeholder groups
There were 34 organizations with unusually active lobbying activity in March, including Heidelberg Materials, Telesat, Novo Nordisk Canada, and Canadian Pacific Railway
There were 8 sector-agency pairs with unusually active lobbying activity in March, including Oil and gas companies at the Privy Council
65 organizations registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time this March. Possibly the most interesting of these is Cohere, Canada’s most well-known AI company, which filed both in-House and external lobby registrations in March.
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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 relatively muted in March, with just under 2,300 communication filings, considerably below February’s elevated activity levels.
2. Unusual Lobbying Activity
What industries were the main source of communications activity in March? 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 March?
Exhibit 2 displays eight sectors with “Excess Comms > 16” (on the left). Exhibit 3 breaks these out, sorted by the relative deviation of Excess over Comms.
Aerospace product and parts manufacturing organizations for instance were considerably more active than usual, as their 81 meetings with office holders were 48 more than preedicted by past behavior. Other unusually active sectors included Indigenous stakeholders, and organizations in the cement and concrete, metals-mining, and software sectors, as well as charitable organizations, E-NGOs and universities.
Which particular organizations displayed unusual lobbying activity in March?
A simple prediction model on the number of filings at the organization-month-level identifies which organizations were unusually active in March, relative to their own past lobbying activity. Exhibit 4 lists all organizations with “Excess Comms > 7,” nested in (sorted by) their sector.
Organizations with the most unusual levels of lobbying activity in March included the Aerospace Industries Association Of Canada, Heidelberg Materials, Rio Tinto Canada, Telesat Canada, Novo Nordisk Canada, and the Canadian Pacific Railway.
3. 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 5 shows sector-agency pairs with unusual lobbying activities in March, specifically those pairs with 9+ more meetings than predicted by past activity.
March saw organizations in the Aerospace sector meeting with Global Affairs Canada, organizations in the Cement and Telecomms sectors meeting with ISED, charitable organizations meeting with Employment and Social Development Canada, Defence companies meeting with the Department of National Defence, and Oil and gas companies meeting with the Privy Council Office, all with unusual frequency relative to these sector-agency pairs’ usual activity. (Defence contractors tend to more often meet with the PMO, PCO and individual MPs and senatorsthan with the DND.)
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 6 below lists the 65 organizations that registered to lobby federally in Canada for the first time in March 2024. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is Cohere, Canada’s most well-known AI company, which filed both in-House and external lobby registrations with PAA, Canada’s largest lobby-firm.
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 March/2024.