Ottawa's most lobby-active stakeholder groups in February
Ottawa's most lobby-active stakeholder groups in February
Performing arts at PrairiesCan, Universities at Immigration (IRCC), and Miners and Nuclear Power at NRCan
Today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics looks at the stakeholder groups that were unusually active in their GR communications in February/2024.
The CliffsNotes:
There were just under 4,000 federal communications filings in February 2024
the Performing arts, Social assistance NGOs, Indigenous communities, the Cement industry, E-NGOs and Aquaculture were among the sectors with unusually high communications levels in February
Organizations with highly elevated communication filings included the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, Lehigh Hanson Materials Limited, the Aerospace Industries Association Of Canada, and the Canadian Council For Sustainable Aviation Fuels
1. The 30,00 Foot View
Ottawa’s GR landscape was back in full swing this February, with almost 4,000 communication filings. And we came out of holiday-lull much more “spring-loaded” than we did at the same time last year, as can be seen on LobbyIQ’s big picture dashboard in Exhibit 1.
2. Elevated Communications Activity By Sector
Who were the main sources of communications activity in February? 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 (“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.
Universities and E-NGOs were the biggest outliers on the left, with 155 and 134 excess communications respectively.
Let’s take a closer look.
To tag unusual behavior, we rank-order sectors by the relative size of of their excess communications, i.e. the ratio of excess over actual communications. Exhibit 3 shows the resulting list. Universities and E-NGOs are not at the very top, because they always exhibit high levels of communications. Instead, the stakeholder-groups with the highest relative level of communications in February came from the Performing arts (52/74), Social assistance NGOs (32/46), and Indigenous communities (67/98), as well as the Cement industry (21/33).
3. Which Institutions did stakeholders target?
In some cases, stakeholder groups’ elevated lobbying is spread across many branches of the government, in other cases it is more targeted, which can potentially indicate specific policy objectives. To look for this, we fan the communications-data out into a panel of sector-institution pair monthly time-series, and look for breakouts from the predicted number of communications at this pair-month-level. Exhibit 3 shows notable outliers, with the first column (Comms_~c) showing the ratio of pair-wise communications and its deviation from the model-prediction. For example, communications of stakeholders from the Performing arts with PrairiesCan were not just high (22) but unusually high, with an excess of 19 relative to historical patterns.
3. Communications Campaigns
In some cases, a sector’s or stakeholder group’s elevated lobbying is driven by many separate organizations, in other cases it is driven by a few organizations, which may just reflect of “lobby day” of coordinated meet-and-greets, but may also indicate a targeted lobby campaign.
For example, Exhibit 5 shows that the Air transportation sector’s elevated lobbying was entirely driven by the Canadian Council For Sustainable Aviation Fuels, and the Electric power generation sector’s was entirely driven by the Canadian Renewable Energy Association.
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. In Exhibit 6, this generates a full listing of instances where sectors’ and stakeholder groups’ unexpectedly high communications in Exhibit 2/3 can be accounted for by focused communication campaigns by individual organizations.
This concludes today’s issue of Queen Street Analytics. Next week, we look at the government institutions, public officer holders, and MPs that were most lobbied in February/2024.