March’s most in-demand office holders in Ottawa
March’s most in-demand office holders in Ottawa
busy months for Chrystia Freeland, Seamus O'Regan, Marie-Claude Bibeau, Ahmed Hussen, Yasir Naqvi, and Paul Halucha
Lobbying is the grease that lubricates the gears of our country’s legislative and regulatory machinery, shaping the contours of laws and rules that govern the business environment. That is why, every month, Queen Street Analytics provides updates on the most lobbied Ministers, MPs, Senators and civil servants in the previous month.
Table of Contents:
March’s most lobbied Ministers
March’s most lobbied MPs
March’s most lobbied office holders, by Agency
March’s most lobbied officials, by Subject and Issue
For a comparison to the last issue on the same topic, see here:
Queen Street Analytics provides a monthly high-level overview of the most lobbied Ministers, MPs, Senators, and civil servants. If your organization has more specific needs, such as:
accessing data-driven recommendations on which civil servants, and MPs to talk to on specific issues
measuring the effect of past GR activity on key legislation
receiving weekly email updates on who got lobbied in key agencies or on key subjects and issues
accessing breakdowns of who else is lobbying same officials
historical snapshots of lobbying activity at any time since 2010,
consider subscribing to LobbyIQ’s GR-tracking package.
1. March’s Most Lobbied Ministers
Exhibit 1 lists the current cabinet’s ministers, with the number of meetings and communications they took in March, and the trailing twelve month (TTM) average of meetings they had in a typical month between February 2023 and 2024.
Different parts of this table will be relevant to different readers, so this article doesn’t discuss any one minister’s meetings in detail, but some high-level observations are that ECCC’s Steven Guilbeault took far fewer meetings in March, while Chrystia Freeland, in the midst of budget season, took twice her normal number of meetings, and Seamus O'Regan, Marie-Claude Bibeau, and Ahmed Hussen also each took considerably more meetings than usual.
2. March’s Most Lobbied MPs
In Exhibit 2, we list the MPs with the most lobby communications and meetings in March, including their riding and the committees they sit on. (TTM again reporting on the pre-March twelve-month average of meetings.)
Yasir Naqvi, the Liberal MP from Ottawa Centre, was by far March’s busiest MP when it came to meeting with lobbyists, while Francesco Sorbara (Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge), and Gérard Deltell (CPC, Louis-Saint-Laurent), usually the two busiest MPs when it comes to meeting lobbyists, had relatively quiet months.
3. March’s Most Lobbied DPOHs, by Agency
Finally, the most communications by far occur at the level of the bureaucracy. Exhibit 3 lists the 30 busiest designated public office holders (DPOHs) in March, organized by their agencies. TTM reports on their pre-March twelve-month meetings-average (TTM) and the Rank-field ranks the top-30 in March.
Paul Halucha, Deputy Secretary at the Privy Council was the busiest DPOH in March, taking 36 meetings or communications.
Breaking the DPOHs’ meetings down by who they met with is too much information to fit into this newsletter’s format, but that information can readily be gleaned from LobbyIQ’s dashboards for individual DPOHs (and similar dashboards for ministers and MPs), of which Exhibit 3 shows a snapshot for Paul Halucha.
4. March’s Most Lobbied Officials, by Subject and Issue
A final useful slicing of office holders is by subject or issue, where subject refers to the lobby-register’s pre-set 53 subject-matters while issue refers to any curated set of keywords.
LobbyIQ’s “who to talk to” recommender-engine offers breakdowns of the most lobbied officials on any subject, as well as on any user-created issue.
If identifying the right officials to engage with on a specific issue is important in your organization, you may consider trialing LobbyIQ’s “who to talk to” recommender-engine, which also identifies the MPs that are most engaged with an issue on the legislative front.
This concludes today’s issue on March’s most lobbied ministers, MPs, and public office holders.
Next week, we start diving into April’s government relations data landscape.