Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am extremely happy to be here today. These meetings are very important to me. I am accompanied today by our counsel, Bruce Bergen, by Karen Shepherd, Director of Investigations, as well as by Pierre Ricard-Desjardins, Director of Operations.
I think it was interesting to hear the bit of discussion about a seminar. We're going to try to whip very quickly through this deck that we have, but for an act that is relatively simple in its intent, it's a little tricky to work your way through. Particularly if you are going to be asking some questions about what Bill C-2 might mean for this, as I've been advised you might, it's very important to budget a bit of your time to do this. So I commend the committee for the learning that needs to go on, and I apologize to those members of the committee who may have heard some of this before and possibly know more than I do about the act.
What is a senior public servant without a deck? So we have a deck to go through, and I'll start on page 3.
Why do lobbying laws exist? Of course we aren't the only jurisdiction that has lobbying laws, and I'll say a little bit about that in a second. The pretty simple reason they exist and they're being talked about in all jurisdictions, or in most jurisdictions, is to address the concern that some people have more access to government decision-makers and thus to influence government decision than other people have, and they do this by virtue of hiring people either because of who they know or what they know about government. This ends up being a concern in democracies, and so lobbying laws become enacted, I believe, to contribute to confidence in the integrity of government decision-making. This isn't about just creating a registry with names on it; this is about the outcome of confidence in government decision-making.
As I mentioned, there are laws in many jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions consider lobbying law to be part of a family of ethics legislation, so some folks in some jurisdictions may have my responsibilities, and they may also be responsible for election law, election financing. Here in Canada at the federal level currently, the Parliament has chosen to make this just a single lobbying registration function.
The emphasis in most legislation in various jurisdictions ends up being on transparency rather than regulation in most cases, especially at the beginning, and then as the legislation matures, usually the disclosure gets more intense and some regulation starts to move in. This is what we're seeing through BillC-2, I believe. I know the OECD is studying lobbying law. The United States have a myriad of different legislation at the federal level and the state level. I saw something from New York City the other day. Five provinces in Canada have lobbying legislation: British Columbia; Ontario; Nova Scotia; Newfoundland and Labrador; and Quebec, which is the closest to the legislative powers that we have here at the federal level. The latest trend is that you're hearing about municipal registries. In fact, the City of Toronto asked me to go down, which I did earlier this summer, and talk to them about our federal registry, because they've just enacted their own regulations for the City of Toronto, and I know a couple of other cities are talking about it. I would point out that in Quebec the provincial legislation covers municipal lobbying as well, so my colleague Pierre-André Côté has quite a lot on his hands.
As for the history, very quickly, the Lobbying Act has been around for about 17 years. In some major initiatives in 1996 there was the introduction of the lobbyists code of conduct, which Karen will speak to briefly in a second. The most recent amendments to the act came into force only last summer, with tremendous effect actually in terms of the number of registrations, and now we see that Bill C-2, the Federal Accountability Act, has major amendments proposed to the Lobbyists Registration Act.
The Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists has been around, of course, as long as the registry. In 1994 the Ethics Counsellor was made responsible for the registry as well as being Ethics Counsellor. In 2004 Parliament decided to split that function, creating the office of Mr. Shapiro--Mr. Bernard Shapiro was the Ethics Commissioner--and the residual responsibilities were given to an ADM at Industry Canada, which Mr. Tilson knows because he asked me that question the very first time I appeared. I was that ADM, and the question was very appropriately, “How can you be an ADM and also be the registrar of lobbyists?” So not long after, with the workload increasing and, I would like to say, with the encouragement of the members of that committee at the time, the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists became a stand-alone function within Industry Canada at that time and my office was moved. Physically we moved out, and I became the registrar of lobbyists on a full-time basis and was no longer the assistant deputy minister.
Then in February 2006 when there were some machinery moves around the creation of the cabinet of Prime Minister Harper, one move was made that didn't get a lot of attention but was certainly very important for us and, I think, for the independence of the portfolio. As you can do in the machinery of government at the federal level, my office was made a department--all 20 of us--for the purposes of the Federal Accountability Act. I was made the deputy head of that office, and we were moved to the portfolio of the President of the Treasury Board.
I would say the registrar of lobbyists is a unique creation within government. It's a public servant--
