The Year in Review #3: 2023's top issues and subject-matters
The Year in Review #3: 2023's top issues and subject-matters
The subject-matters and key phrases that drove government communications in 2023
Welcome to Queen Street Analytics’ second “Year in Review” issue for 2023. In today’s issue, we look at 2023’s most lobbied-on subject-matters and keyword issues.
CliffsNotes version:
The annual ranking among the lobby-registry’s 53 canned subject-matters does not vary all that much year-to-year. Having said that. the biggest buckets of up-moves from 2022 to 2023 were in cost-of-living and financial matters (with Taxation and Finance moving from 12th most highly-lobbied in 2022 to 7th in 2023, Budget from 15th to 10th, Housing from 28th to 18th, and Financial Institutions from 27th to 23rd), and natural-resource related matters (Natural Resources moving from 36th to 21st most lobbied, and Mining from 29th to 22nd)
Turning to machine-learning extracted key phrases from registrations, the top-two most salient key phrases driving lobby communications in 2023 were the same as the top-two in 2022: the Environmental Protection Act, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The 3rd and 4th most salient key phrases, however, were new in 2023: the Canadian Human Rights Act and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, neither of which showed up prominently in lobby-communications in 2022.
2023 also saw a rise in the salience of climate related key phrases such as Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change Principles, as well as cost-of-living and housing-related key phrases such as Agricultural Policy Framework, and National Housing Strategy, among dozens of others
Amongst more narrowly clustered issues, fisheries, aviation and railway-related key phrases were on the rise in 2023, as did small modular reactors.
The issue-space with the biggest drop in lobby-communications salience revolved around tourism, with 5 separate phrases amongst the biggest 2022-2023 drops.
1. Subject Matters
A quick gauge of the most active lobbied-on subject matters of 2023 can be gleaned from LobbyIQ's “big picture” dashboard. Exhibit 1 shows a snapshot of the subject-exhibit on that dashboard. When sorted on the 12-month average column (12M Avg), we get a quick view of the 25 most lobbying-active issues of 2023. At the top of the list, we see the the Environment, Economic Development, Industry, Energy and Health.
How does this compare to 2022? To answer this question quickly, we can use the WaybackMachine (the green button on the top-right of Exhibit 2) on LobbyIQ's “big picture” dashboard to navigate to the state of affairs 12 months ago. As might be expected, the annual ranking among the lobby-registry’s 53 canned subject-matters does not vary all that much year-to-year: the top-six most lobbied subject-matters in 2022 (the pie-chart) turn than out to be the same as those in 2023.
So, the biggest subject-matter buckets don’t move much year-on-year and that’s not likely to surprise our readers. There is, however, always more variation across the subjects in the middle range, so we investigate those below Exhibit 2.
Exhibit 3 digs down into the top-25 most lobbied-on subject matters of 2023, and things do start to vary more as we go down the list (contrasting 2023 and 2022 across the table columns). Among the movers in Exhibit 3 (i.e. Rank23 being different from Rank22), the biggest buckets of up-moves from 2022 to 2023 appear to be related to cost-of-living and financial matters, and natural-resource related matters:
Taxation and Finance moving from 12th most highly-lobbied in 2022 to 7th
Budget moving from 15th to 10th
Housing moving from 28th to 18th
Financial Institutions moving from 27th to 23rd
Natural Resources moving from 36th to 21st most lobbied
Mining moving from 29th to 22nd
Exhibit 3 does show more over-time movement in salience of subjects, but what is still lacking from Exhibit 3 is granularity. With a list of only 53, subject-matters inherently lack the the granularity needed to really see specific issues emerging, or dropping in importance
2. Key Word Issues
This is where key phrases come in handy: LobbyIQ uses machine-learning algorithms to determine which phrases characterize the lobbying-communications in specific sectors in a given month, and these key phrases give us a much more fine-grained look at what is really driving government communications (with the obvious caveat that there are always things that simply go unsaid/unwritten in any communication).
We aggregated all sector-month key phrases up to the year, to generate a count that is basically a truncated sum of how often a key phrase appeared in lobby communications (or rather, the underlying registrations), conditional on it having been determined to have been central to a sector-months corpus of communications. (This avoids pulling in phrases that are commonly used but not actually central to characterize a corpus of text.)
Key phrases often end up being policies, acts, bills, or initiatives.
Exhibit 4 shows the key phrases that most drove lobby communications in 2023. At the top, the Environmental Protection Act reigns supreme in 2023 by a country mile, as it already did in 2022. In second place, and perhaps less expected, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency also retains its 2022 rank as the second-most important key phrase that characterized lobbying for the year. But below that, things really moved from 2022 to 2023.
the 3rd and 4th most important key phrases, the Canadian Human Rights Act and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance both shot of prominence after the tragic events of October 7th, when neither had been near the top-100 in 2022
Communications related to climate change also rose in prominence in 2023, with Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change Principles among the main ones.
2023’s focus on soaring food prices and housing shortages manifested in the newly prominent key phrases Agricultural Policy Framework and National Housing Strategy.
2023’s focus on student visas show up in the key phrase Canada Graduate Scholarship Program.
When we look at the key phrases with the biggest count-increases outside of the top-25, Exhibit 5 uncovers some interesting additional patterns. On the energy and climate change front, for example, we see the emergence of additional climate-related phrases such as Emissions Reduction Plan, Clean Fuels Standards, and Coal Mining Effluent Regulations, and we also see Small Nuclear Reactors beginning to get talked about more in lobby-communications
Looking at changes from the other side of the coin, Exhibit 6 shows the top-25 key phrases of 2022 that were no longer in the top-25 in 2023 (i.e. not listed in Exhibit 4) and and how they ranked in 2023.
At the top of the list are Canadian Muslim Communities and the Security Infrastructure Program (SIP), designed to address hate crime.
Then there is a big, und unsurprising, drop from the post-Covid peak in tourism-related lobbying (with Canadian Travel Incentive Program, Inbound Leisure Travel, National Tourism Marketing Agency, Domestic Travel Recovery all taking a step back from 2022 prominence). This decline in the tourism as an issue also showed up in our first year in review issue two weeks ago, which drew 2022-2023 comparisons of lobby-communications by sector:
There are also some agriculture and forestry-related issues that saw steep drops in communication activity.
This concludes today’s issue. Next week, we will look at the institutions and public office holders that were most targeted for government communications in 2023, and compare them to 2022.