Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
If you are interested in figures, you can turn to page 14, where you will find a breakdown, by category, of currently registered lobbyists. I should tell you at the outset that the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists keeps two kinds of statistics: the number of registrations and the number of lobbyists.
As we explained a few moments ago, a single registration entry from a corporation or a non-profit organization may contain a number of names. We might have a company registered with the name of 15 lobbyists. The converse holds too: a consultant-lobbyist may have 20 clients—in other words, there might be 20 different registration entries for a given lobbyist. To add to the confusion, we should bear in mind that a lobbyist can, depending on his or her category, have more or fewer registration entries.
I think we should also know that we now have over 5,000 lobbyists. In fact, 5,100 lobbyists are registered. That is a high number. For comparison's sake, there are some 500 in Quebec. So there are ten times more lobbyists registered at the federal level. To be precise, there are 6,950 registry entries, a very high number as well. This is because a single lobbyist may register a number of times.
I have provided these details for your information. If you have no further questions, I will give Karen the floor .