Special Issue on Indigenous Lobbying

This is a gap-week between our regular October and November newsletter cycles, which means we do a special issue on one of our reader-suggested topics. This week, we are taking a deep dive into the state of federal lobbying by Indigenous stakeholders.

The CliffsNotes version:

• Almost 200 Indigenous organizations have lobbied in Ottawa over the last 15 years, classified into around 140 “Indigenous public administration” (e.g. individual communities) and around “Indigenous advocacy organizations” (e.g. various Assemblies, Associations and Councils)

• Indigenous organizations’ lobbying in Ottawa was flat from 2009-2015, but has increased dramatically under the Trudeau administration, in absolute terms but also relative to all other lobbying organizations

• Indigenous organizations’ lobbying on the generic subject matter of “Aboriginal Affairs” has been decreasing in importance over time, while “Economic Development” has been increasing

• Over ninety percent of all lobbying by Indigenous organizations is done through external consultant firms, far higher than average.

• We take a look at the main lobby consultant firms representing Indigenous clients.

1. Indigenous Advocacy in Ottawa: a Snapshot

We draw our data from LobbyIQ, where two sectors encompass the vast majority of all Indigenous organizations: “Indigenous public administration” (PA), which includes any individual First Nations communities that lobby the federal government, and “Indigenous advocacy organizations” (AO) which includes umbrella organizations such as the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (CCAB) and issue-based organizations such as the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Overall, there are 134 PA organizations who have ever lobbied the federal government, of which over 90% are individual First Nations, and there are 48 AO organizations. Exhibits 1 and 2 show the aggregate top-line lobbying activity for PA and AO organizations on LobbyIQ’s sector-dashboards.

Exhibit 1: Lobby communications summary for Indigenous public administration

Exhibit 2: Lobby communications summary for Indigenous advocacy organizations

Many of these organizations have only lobbied a handful of times overall, or have not lobbied much recently, but there are more than 50 organizations that have filed at least 15 communications in the last 24 months.

There are a handful of lobbying-active Indigenous-owned corporations that are classified into other sectors, including Broadcast media, Education, and Banking. The most lobbying-active such organization is Nukik, an Inuit-owned company in the Construction (heavy and civil infrastructure) sector, for which Exhibit 3 shows LobbyIQ’s dashboard. Our special issue does not include data for any of these organizations if they are not classified in the two sectors in Exhibits 1 and 2.

Exhibit 3: Nukik's dashboard on LobbyIQ

2. How much Indigenous lobbying is there?

Exhibit 4 shows the evolution of the number of lobbying communications filed by Indigenous organizations, compared to all others. For scaling, we normalize the two series to a common base of 100 in 2009. For 2023, we extrapolate the data by multiplying the data for January-September by a scaling-factor of x 12/9.

A few things stand out from Exhibit 4:

• Indigenous lobbying has increased almost nine-fold over the last fifteen years, while non-Indigenous lobbying has only increased three-fold. In short, the Indigenous presence in Ottawa has increased considerably

• There appears to be a clear Trudeau-effect: the entire relative increase in Indigenous federal lobbying happened after 2015. In fact, the Indigenous presence in Ottawa was declining relative to all other stakeholders under the Harper government (=blue line below red for 2011-2015)

• Most of the increased Indigenous presence in Ottawa was established in two short time-windows in 2016-17 and then again in 2022.

Exhibit 4: normalized (base=100) Indigenous vs non-Indigenous federal lobbying

Exhibit 5 shows a very similar-looking pattern when we count the number of unique organizations that lobby the federal government.

Exhibit 5: normalized (base=100) Indigenous vs non-Indigenous organizations

Finally, Exhibit 6 subsumes Exhibits 4 and 5 into a single image of the relative Indigenous shares in lobbying communications and lobbying organizations in Ottawa.

Exhibit 6: Indigenous share in federal lobby-filings and lobbying organizations

3. What do Indigenous stakeholders lobby about?

What subject matters do Indigenous stakeholders lobby about? Every federal communication filing has at least one subject matter assigned to it, drawn from a pre-set list of 54 choices. This inherently limits what we can learn from subject matters, i.e. seeing Indigenous stakeholders lobby on “Aboriginal Affairs” sheds about as much light on proceedings as seeing oil and gas companies lobby on “Energy.” However, one clear pattern we did find was a general downward trend in Indigenous lobbying on the catch-all issue of “Aboriginal Affairs” and a diffusion into lobbying on more specific subjects. This is shown by the down-trending blue line in Exhibit 7. Among the other subjects, the clearest patterns we found were a general uptrend in lobbying on “Economic Development” and the temporary emergence of significant lobbying on Government Procurement (green line), which appears to have come to an end now.

Exhibit 7: share of Indigenous lobby-filings by three select subject matters

4. Whom do Indigenous organizations lobby?

Which government branches are lobbied by Indigenous organizations?

Until 2015, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada was the main government institution interfacing with Indigenous stakeholders. In 2015, Aboriginal Affairs was replaced by Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, which in turn was dissolved at the end of 2018 and split into Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) and Indigenous Services Canada (ISC). Given these institutional re-organizations, Exhibit 8 focuses on the last five years since 2018. CIRNAC, MPs in the House of Commons, and ISC are the top-three most lobbied government branches for Indigenous stakeholders in each of the last five years (shares of filings in brackets).

Exhibit 8: Indigenous stakeholders' lobbying by government institution, 5 years

Below the top-three, Exhibit 8 displays a lot of variation year-on-year: prominently lobbied institutions include Finance Canada (FIN), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Infrastructure Canada (INFC), the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), Health Canada (HC), Canadian Heritage (PCH), and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).

For a full listing of government institutions, ranked by lobbying-activity, check out LobbyIQ’s Institutions list.

5. How do Indigenous stakeholders lobby?

For Exhibit 9, we broke down all communications by Indigenous vs non-Indigenous groups, and whether the communications were filed by an internal lobbyist or an external consultant lobbyist.

Exhibit 9 shows that over ninety percent of all lobbying by Indigenous stakeholders is done by external consultant firms (blue x’s). The average across all other stakeholder groups in Ottawa is less than thirty percent (red triangles).

Exhibit 9: share lobbying with external consultants vs in-House, Indigenous vs non-Indigenous, over 15 years

While this could be read as implying a need to build more capacity for internal lobbying inside of Indigenous stakeholder groups, there are in fact many good reasons not to do this: most Indigenous stakeholder groups are small, and many of them lobby only occasionally and with a narrowly defined purpose. Under those circumstances it is most likely not worth maintaining a registered lobbyist internally. See our newsletter #3 in September for an exploration of this point, and the sizable sector-differences in the extent of in-House lobbying vs lobbying through external consultants

September's Ottawa Lobbying Update #3

Finally, who are the lobby firms representing Indigenous stakeholders? Exhibit 10 shows the fifteen consultant lobby firms with the highest number of communication filings representing Indigenous clients over the last five years.

Exhibit 10: most active lobby-firms representing Indigenous stakeholders, last five years

How does Exhibit 10 compare to Canada’s most active lobby-firms? Ranks 5-10 (from Sandstone to StrategyCorp), 13 (Bluesky) and 15 (Earnscliffe) are all among Canada’s top-15 largest lobby firms (measured by federal communications filings).

Outside of that, however, we see three firms that are very boutique (Chadwick Consulting, Cheema Strategies, and Creative Fire), and the others (Blackbird Strategies, Public Affairs Counsel, Strategies North Advisory, 11871722, CCSGroup) are all medium-sized.

Overall, this suggest Indigenous clients seek out a mix of consultants to represent them: some boutique specialized firms but also some of the firms with the largest practices.

This concludes our first special issue outside of our regular weekly newsletter format. We hope you found it insightful and look forward to your suggestions for future special issue topics.

Next week’s November’s newsletter #1 will cover last month’s most lobbying-active sectors and organizations.