Ottawa’s top-consultants and lobby-firms in January
Ottawa’s top-consultants and lobby-firms in January
Bluesky Strategy, Forecheck Strategies, Fratton Park’s Regan Watts, Prospectus’ Bruce Hartley, Alar’s Richard Maksymetz, and NorthStar’s Greg MacNeil
In today’s issue we look at January’s busiest consultants and lobby-firms.
The CliffsNotes version:
January’s 2000+ had lobby communication filings. 627 of these, or 30%, involved external consultants.
These 627 were associated with 377 unique registrations across 102 separate lobby-firms.
January saw big jumps in activity from Bluesky Strategy, with 31 filings relative to a 12-month average of 22 (272/12), and even bigger jumps at Forecheck Strategies and Fratton Park
There were 13 consultants with 8+ filings in January. Outside some well-known names, the list of movers and shakers included Fratton Park’s Regan Watts, Prospectus’ Bruce Hartley, Alar’s Richard Maksymetz, Forecheck Strategies’ Michaela Johnson and Enterprise’s Jesse Shea.
Capital Hill Group tops the leaderboard of new registrations
Among individual consultants, Capital Hill Group’s David Angus and NorthStar PA’s Greg MacNeil top the leaderboard of new registrations.
1. Lobby-Firms and Lobbyists Comms Leaderboard
Of January’s 2000+ lobby communication filings, 627, or 30%, involved external lobby consultants. These 627 were associated with 377 unique registrations across 102 separate lobby-firms.
Exhibit 1 breaks these filings across the major firms, showing the 25 most active firms in January, with the filings in the second column.
Which are the surprise packages on January’s leaderboard?
Exhibit2 (ranked by January filings) highlights the surprises, by comparing the January columns to the 12-month activity column on LobbyIQ's lobby-firm overview. The surprise packages in January include Bluesky Strategy, with 31 filings relative to a 12-month average of 22 (272/12), Forecheck Strategies, and Fratton Park
Forecheck Strategies in particular is an interesting newcomer on the scene, so let’s take a closer look. Exhibit 3 shows that Forecheck got started in 2023, but has already filed as many meetings in January 2024 as they did in all of 2023, an impressive trajectory.
Forecheck Strategies’ case also reinforces once again that while Canada generally ranks as having among the highest barriers to industry-entry among OECD countries (not great for competitiveness and productivity), our GR industry is actually highly competitive, as reflected in a very low concentration index.
Which individual lobbyists drove communication filings activity?
Exhibit 3 shows the leaderboard of individual consultants with 8+ meetings in January. The second-last column reports on the number of active registrations represented in those communications, and the last column reports on the same consultants’ December meetings.
The usual suspects: Many names on the list are always on a near the communications leaderboard. These include David Pratt, NATIONAL’s Marc Desmarais, Sussex’s Dan Lovell, Counsel’s John Delacourt, Sandstone’s Naresh Raghubeer and Capital Hill Group’s David Angus.
Among newer consultants, the biggest movers and shakers on the list are Fratton Park’s Regan Watts, Prospectus’ Bruce Hartley, Alar’s Richard Maksymetz, Forecheck Strategies’ Michaela Johnson and Enterprise’s Jesse Shea.
2. Lobby-Firms’ and Lobbyists’ Registration Leaderboards
Which lobby firms and consultants registered the most new relationships last month?
To answer this question accurately we exclude registration-renewals, and do not double-count multiple registrations per firm-client pair (i.e. more than one consultant per firm for the same client relationship).
Exhibit 5 shows January’s leaderboard, listing the number of new registrations (NewReg) as well as the number of new relationships, i.e. registrations not preceded by any existing registration between the same client and lobby-firm.
SJE Consulting is a really interesting case in Exhibit 5, because they highlight the extensive range that we see in the ratio of communications to registrations in the federal GR landscape.
This is shown in Exhibit 6: David Pratt & Associates occupies one edge case, filing 230 meetings in 2023 from just 11 registrations. SJE Consulting occupies the opposite edge case, filing a single communications meeting from a whopping 37 registrations.
Exhibit 7 breaks down the aggregates in Exhibit 5 by clients; where the last column indicates when multiple consultants filed registrations for the same firm-client relationship.
Lastly, Exhibit 8 breaks out new registrations by consultants. Capital Hill Group’s David Angus and NorthStar PA’s Greg MacNeil jointly lead the pack here.
From the individuals’ perspectives, 5 new registrations is a small change in David Angus’ large client portfolio of 57 active registrations (the highest of any consultant in Ottawa, by some distance), while 5 new registrations more than doubled Greg MacNeil’s client portfolio, as shown in Exhibit 9.
This concludes our issue on January’s lobby-firm and consultants. Next week, we look at the keywords and issues that drove lobby communications in January.