—especially in the first two years as a minister, because of the conflict of interest rules, not the Lobby Act rules, and one year as a senior government official covered by the Conflict of Interest Act.
For anybody else, again, you just have to join a corporation and lobby less than 20% of the time, or, if you have a healthy pension or you are doing other work, lobby for free and you can do it and you don't have to register. So there is no five-year ban; it's a five-year ban on being a registered lobbyist.
Yes, a sliding scale of one to five years, depending on who you are, is what we're suggesting. You would just have categories. If you were not on a committee, just a backbench MP, you'd sit out for one year. But if you joined a committee halfway through your term, then you would be bumped up to one and a half years or two years and just slide it on up, depending on the power, so that on the opposition party side, opposition critics would sit out more than committee members; on the government side, the parliamentary secretaries would sit out more, then ministers of state, then the full cabinet ministers, and the same with staff.
Staff have to be covered. Right now they're not, except in the leader of the opposition's office, in terms of opposition parties. That would really solve things.
A lot of people don't realize that, in terms of loopholes and who has to register, the 20% rule is totally different for an NGO, for a non-profit or any type of organization. At an organization you have to count up all of the time your staff spends lobbying and pretend you're one person. So if you have five staff and they each spend 4.1% of their time lobbying, that's five times 4.1%, which crosses the 20% threshold, and all five have to be listed in the registration.
The 20% rule has always been there to hide corporate lobbying. NGOs have always had a higher threshold of disclosure, which is perverse because they obviously have less power in most situations than the big business lobbyists.