Ottawa's most lobbied office holders and institutions in January
Ottawa's most lobbied office holders and institutions in January
Finance Canada, Andrew Bevan (FIN), E-NGOs, and BlackBerry
Today, we look at the public office holders and government institutions that saw the most communications from stakeholders in January.
CliffsNotes version:
The 2,000+ communication filings in January amounted to 1,806 actual separate meetings.
261 (14% of all January meetings) involved an MP, and 213 (12%) involved an ADM or higher-ranking civil servant.
January’s DPOH leaderboard saw several newcomers, including Finance Canada’s Andrew Bevan and ISED’s Amitpal Singh
January’s biggest institutions-outlier was Finance Canada with 85 more meetings than predicted by historical patterns
The Environment and wildlife (E-NGOs) sector was one of several sectors with elevated communication-levels across several institutions
BlackBerry stood out among organizations, with elevated communication-levels across three institutions, PSPC, the PMO, and GAC.
For a comparison to the last issue on the same topic, see here:
0. The 30,000 Foot View
To look at the number of actual meetings taken by each DPOH, we first clean up duplicate filings, which arise mechanically (when multiple registered lobbyists attend the same meeting but filing separately) or unintentionally by human error (when the same lobbyist files twice, which some are prone to do repeatedly in the data).
Once duplicates are cleaned up, the just over 2,000+ communication filings in January amounted to 1,806 separate meetings. 261 of those (14%) involved an MP, and 213 (12%) involved an ADM or higher-ranking civil servant.
1. Most Lobbied Public Office Holders in January
Table 1 starts with a look at January’s 25 most lobbied public office holders (DPOHs), with the number of their January meetings listed, as well as the title they hold, and the institutions they represent (institutional abbreviations listed here).
Several of the names in Table 1 have been on our leaderboard for many months, but there is also some interesting newcomers at the top, including, for example, ISED’s Amitpal Singh. Indeed, Figure 1 shows him as the biggest mover in ISED, measured by number of meetings taken in recent months.
2. Communications by Government Agency
Zooming out one level, which government institutions saw unusual amounts of lobbying in January?
To break this down, we run a trend-cycle prediction model over all filings aggregated at the institution-month (a panel of 160 monthly-frequency institution time-series that allows for separate monthly shifters for each institution). This generates monthly institution-level predictions of how many meetings to expect based on the patterns over the last five years, and in Table 2, we show the biggest outliers in terms of deviation from prediction (the second number in the Meet_Exc column). Finance Canada, ECCC, NRCan and the PMO stand out here, as well as the Privy Council, Immigration, Refugees, Citizenship (IRCC), and Public Safety Canada (PS).
The last column shows the number of unique DPOHs involved in the meetings, which shows a substantial spread, with 25 DPOHs involved in the PMO’s 123 meetings, but 91 involved in NRCan’s 125 meetings.
To what extent were January’s excess meetings for any institution driven by excess communications from specific sectors?
To break this down, we run our trend-cycle prediction model over all filings aggregated at the institution-sector month (a panel of several thousand monthly-frequency time-series that allows for separate monthly shifters for each institution-sector pair) to generate monthly institution-sector level predictions of how many meetings to expect based on the patterns over the last five years.
Table 3 shows that several sectors had elevated communication levels across more than one institution:
The Environment and wildlife (E-NGOs) sector had elevated communication-levels with Finance Canada, NRCan, and ISC
The Oil and gas sector had elevated communication-levels with Finance Canada, and the Privy Council
The Software sector had elevated communication-levels with the PMO, Global Affairs and PSPC (Public Services and Procurement Canada)
The Universities sector had elevated communication-levels with Global Affairs and PrairiesCan
3. Institution-Organization Outliers
To what extent were January’s excess meetings in any institution-sector pair driven by excess communications from specific organizations?
To break this down, we run our trend-cycle prediction model over all filings aggregated at the institution-organization month (a panel of tens of thousands monthly-frequency time-series that allows for separate monthly shifters for each institution-organization pair) to generate monthly institution-organization level predictions of how many meetings to expect based on the patterns over the last five years.
Table 4 shows the biggest outliers in terms of deviation from normal patterns. Most of the institution-sector pairs in Table 3 cannot be associated with particular organizations’ excess lobbying, which indicates a more sector-wide increase in communications with an institutions. The exception is BlackBerry, which accounts for most of the Software sector’s elevated communications with PSPC, the PMO, and GAC.
Unsurprising then, that Figure 2 shows highly elevated communications activity for BlackBerry overall.
This concludes today’s issue on January’s most lobbied sectors and DPOHs.
Next week, we will look at the most important issues and subject-matters that dominated government communications in Ottawa in January.