I will continue, but that's an important thing to clarify. Thank you for that question. The office can't operate unless you've got that independence.
Page 7 in the deck concerns the registrar of lobbyists. This is what the registrar does. Essentially, we run a registry. When we get interviewed by the press sometimes, the questions are all about how many investigations and what kind of enforcement we're doing. The bulk of our work is running a registry and running it on the Internet. We establish and maintain a registry. We issue advisory opinions and interpretation bulletins regarding various parts of the act. We develop the lobbyists code of conduct, which describes how lobbyists are to behave. We enforce the act and report to Parliament on the act and the code of conduct and on investigations carried out. I'll say a little bit about that a little later.
Page 8 looks at the act itself. There are four points that I think are terribly important. The preamble to the act doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's what a lot of the act is about, namely that free and open access to government is an important matter of public interest and that lobbying public office holders is a legitimate activity. However--it doesn't say “however”, but that's what it reads--it's desirable that public office holders and the general public know who is lobbying and know some information about them. Finally, there is what I consider a point about balance, which is that the system for registration of paid lobbyists--and that's not just the online system, it's the set of rules, and it's how I should behave--should not impede free and open access to government. In other words, the rules shouldn't be so complicated and so heavy, and the registration itself shouldn't be so difficult that they actually have an effect counter to what you're trying to achieve.
Sometimes when I give a presentation like this, and I talk about lobbying, it turns out that lobbying is not necessarily what most of us think it might be. Lobbying, under the act, is communicating--that's why I have these words on page 9 underlined--it's communicating, whether verbally, by e-mail, or in any other way, with a public office holder. And we're all public office holders in this room. It's an incredibly broad definition. It can be with members of the armed forces, members of the RCMP, or with any public servant. There are certain crown corporations that are excluded from that, but it's a very broad definition. And it's communicating for payment--another very important trigger, because volunteer lobbying isn't registerable. If I want to get a group of people together on my street and hammer at the Minister of Heritage Canada to try to get a grant for a Veterans Day parade or some other kind of parade, that's not a registerable activity if nobody is paying me for it, but it is lobbying. I try often not to talk about lobbying so much as about registerable activities under the act. And it's doing those things in respect of this list, which is right out of the act, and which essentially deals with changes to the status quo, decisions about legislation, decisions about policy, that sort of thing.
The final bullet is very important, for consultant lobbyists only, and concerns the act of arranging a meeting. If you hire somebody just to get you into someone's office because you happen to know someone or know how to do it, that is a registerable activity for consultant lobbyists.
There are certain exemptions under the act. Employees and elected members of certain governments--for instance municipal employees of the City of Toronto, and those of the provinces or territories--don't have to register in order to talk to public office holders. Members of certain aboriginal councils and institutions don't have to register. There are a number of other small exemptions concerning some international organizations, for example. There are certain communications that are exempt. Those people who come to talk to you at this committee are not required to register because it's so public. If you have communications with respect to enforcement or interpretation or application of an act, and you're not really trying to change the act, but rather you're trying to figure out what it means to you, that's not registerable. Simple requests for information--How do I fill out this form? How do I go about doing this?--are not registerable.