Evidence of meeting #8 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was lobbyists.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Okay, so as soon as you have reasonable grounds of a contravention of that act or any other—
12:30 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
And that could occur, as I was indicating to the other member, after an administrative review, or it might occur during an investigation.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
All right, so if you get a credible complaint, you carry out an investigation. If you find reasonable grounds, you turn it over to the RCMP.
12:30 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
My first step is the administrative review.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
And that may lead to—
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
Or a referral to—
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
And in some cases I may even determine before initiating an investigation that I have reasonable grounds. Once I determine that I do have reasonable grounds, I must send it to the RCMP.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
Thank you.
We have three more, but I think this is extremely important. The committee has punched around trying to get an answer on this.
There was recently a decision by the Federal Court of Appeal in Democracy Watch v. Barry Campbell and Jim Peterson, concerning rule 8 under the lobbyists' code. The thrust of the decision was that you don't have to prove there was influence; all you have to do is demonstrate there was an attempt. Right?
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
Keeping that in mind, Mr. Bergen said you are not trying to deal with the public office holders but are just monitoring the lobbyists—and the rules are there for that.
The question that has been asked by members, to which I think we would like an answer, concerns the following—if I could refer to what the Speaker says in the House all the time—that you cannot do indirectly what you can't do directly. We can't quote a member's name directly to him, which means that you also cannot read from an article using their name. It's matter of being direct or indirect. So here's the question.
Do we have a loophole in the system that would allow someone, whether paid or unpaid, to go to a person who has influence over a minister but not have an obligation to report? It's bypassing the obligation to register because it's not a direct communication. If I'm going to someone who's not a designated public office holder, is there this loophole where they can in fact go through someone else? For example, if Mr. XYZ, who has a company and wants to get a grant for a client who has a project, goes to the assistant of a minister, whom he knows personally, and that assistant then goes to the minister and says, "Yes, I can take care of it"—and that happens—that seems to me to fall through the crack. And if the employee in the minister's office knows this person and knows they're not a registered lobbyist, there's no obligation on them to report that someone lobbied them, directly or indirectly, on a matter.
Do you understand what the question is?
12:35 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
I think, Mr. Chair, there are a couple of points there.
One, the act requires that the individual be paid, so a volunteer or someone who is not paid, as Mr. Bergen indicated, but is working in their back shed.... One of the principles of the act is free and open access—
12:35 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
If they're paid, that individual is—
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
Say I have a client and I'm representing that client to the minister's staff.
12:35 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
If the individual is a public officer holder, that activity, combined with other things, is a registerable activity. For in-house organizations and corporations, they would need to determine whether they are also hitting a significant amount of time.
The difference, as I've been trying to say, is that the monthly reporting is between the designated public officer holder and the lobbyist. There is still a requirement, as I've been explaining, if you are communicating in terms of a registerable activity, for that individual to file an initial registration. So there would still be a registration in the system if all of the other criteria were met, that here is person X and here are the different things they are lobbying on.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
You've missed one element, and that is that the person they talk to is not the person you want to directly lobby. It's some intermediary who's out of the system but has influence over the minister, such as an assistant in the minister's office.
12:35 p.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
Ministers and ministers of state are public office holders. Also, under the act, ministers and ministers of state and their staff are designated public office holders as well. So communication with a political advisor and the minister's staff would be a registerable....
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
You're satisfied that there is not a loophole and that someone can't circumvent it by going through other intermediaries. Eventually it has to be a public office holder, a designated public holder, or their staff?
12:35 p.m.
Senior Counsel, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
People are very imaginative.
I think the one thing the commissioner mentioned was that any staff in a minister's office or any member of Parliament's office is a public office holder under the Lobbying Act. A communication with them would be a registerable activity.
It's only the exempt staff, who are appointed under subsection 128(1) of the PSEA, who, as the act states, are designated public office holders. So in any minister's office or minister of state's office, there will be a number of people who are also designated public office holders.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Paul Szabo
Okay. Thank you.
Finally, we have Mr. Easter, Madame Bourgeois, and Mr. Siksay.
Mr. Easter.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to come back to this media monitoring. Maybe I have to be more direct. If there is a statement in the press along these lines--some individual was reported to have opened up the Prime Minister's Office to us or said that he or she could get the money--would that be something you would investigate if you saw the individual's name, knowing that the person wasn't a registered lobbyist?