Ottawa's most lobby-active organizations and sectors in January
Ottawa's most lobby-active organizations and sectors in January
E-NGOs, the National Council Of Canadian Muslims, and lots of action among the Telecoms
In today’s issue, we look at the sectors and organizations that stood out in their federal communications activity in January.
The CliffsNotes:
There were just over 2,000 communications filings in January, almost perfectly in line with historical patterns, i.e. what’s predicted by our basic trend-cycle model
E-NGOs, Religious organizations, Universities, and Telecoms were among the sectors with unusually high communications levels in January
The National Council Of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), EDF, Agnico Eagle Mines, Nukik Corporation, Telus, Rogers, and Telesat were among the organizations with focused communications campaigns in January
1. January 2024 in Historical Perspective
There were just over 2,000 communications filings in January.
Is this a big or small number? To answer this question, we run a simple model predicting the total number of filings with a linear time-trends and calendar-month shifters on ten years of historical data. It turns out that the overall level of observed activity in January aligned very closely with the predicted, falling within a 4%-deviation of the model’s prediction.
This is illustrated in Exhibit 1, with the snapshot from LobbyIQ’s big picture dashboard showing that the four-month window October-to-January in 2023-24 resembles that in 2022-23 very closely, with just a little inversion between December and January in those two windows.
2. January’s Noteworthy Outliers By Sector
What were January’s noteworthy outliers in communications activity? To answer this question, we run a simple model predicting the number of filings aggregated to the sector-level with linear time-trends and calendar-month shifters on ten years of historical data. Then we compare the prediction to the actual number and plot the deviation as “actual minus predicted filings.”
With deviations from rank-ordered left-to-right across 150 sectors, we can see a few outlier sectors on the left end of Exhibit 2.
What sectors are the tall bars on the left?
Overall, there were 9 sectors with 20+ excess lobbying filings. Exhibit 3 lists these breakout-sectors, which are, in order:
Environment and wildlife organizations
Religious organizations
Universities, colleges
Software
Telecommunications
Mining (metal ore)
Construction (heavy and civil infrastructure)
Banking
Charitable organizations
Exhibit 3 shows communications filed, and column 2 (the sort-column) shows the deviation from the number of communications predicted by the sectors’ historical patterns. (Column 2 corresponds to the vertical bars in Exhibit 2.)
As a quick consistency check, Exhibit 4 shows the 18-month timelines of two of the outlier sectors (Religious organizations and Universities, colleges) on their respective sector-dashboards on LobbyIQ, allowing us to more visually see January’s break from trend.
3. Organizations’ Communications Campaigns
Some of of the breakout lobbying-patterns in Exhibit 2/3 are invariably driven by the focused communication efforts of specific organizations in each sector.
LobbyIQ’s dashboards provide the quickest gauge for finding focused communication efforts. For example, Exhibits 5 shows a snapshot of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM)’s organization-dashboard on LobbyIQ, where January’s outlier activity can wholly explain the outlier activity in the Religious organizations sector.
To be more systematic in identifying 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 breakouts from the predicted number of communications at the organization-level. This shows us which of the sectors with unexpectedly high communications in Exhibit 2 can be accounted for by focused communication campaigns by one or two organizations.
Exhibit 6 shows that in many cases, the sector-level outliers in Exhibit 2 can be traced back to a handful of organizations. e.g:
The Environmental Defense Fund and David Suzuki Foundation together explain about half of the E-NGOs’ Excess Comms of 88 in Exhibit 3
The NCCM fully explains Religious organizations’ Excess Comms in Exhibit 3
Universities’ Excess Comms are not explained by any one organizations’ activities
Blackberry explains most of the Software sector’s Excess Comms in Exhibit 3
Telus, Rogers and Telesat all showed outlier communication activities in January and together explain all of the Telecomm sector’s 38 Excess Comms in Exhibit 3
Nukik Corporation explains all of the Heavy Construction sector’s Excess Comms in Exhibit 3
This concludes today’s issue. In next week’s issue, we look at the government agencies and public officer holders that saw unusual lobbying communications activity in January.