Evidence of meeting #105 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was lobbying.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Is it something that any self-respecting and honest lobbyist might willingly agree to do without the imposition of new regulations?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
Possibly, but right now the registry is not set up for that, so it would require some changes.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
I understand.
You have indicated you will be offering your thoughts on, perhaps, amendments that might be due, given the age of the existing act later this year. Can you give us a heads-up on any of the areas we should be thinking about in advance of your suggestions, areas that are most in need of reform?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
Certainly, the bigger ones are in the area of transparency, and yes, removing the word “arranged”, I think, is not a big change to be made in the law. It would certainly enhance transparency, because right now the obligation is only to report monthly those communications that are oral and arranged in advance. The word “arranged” should be dropped, as far as I'm concerned.
The big one is the significant part of duties. That is extremely difficult to enforce.
Certainly, on the enforcement front, to develop a spectrum of sanctions.... Right now, the way the act is written, we start an investigation, and if there is an indication of an offence—offence being someone is not timely, has lobbied without being registered, or is lobbying while prohibited—I have to suspend everything, and send it to the RCMP. We wait, and then we come back. We then do a report, which is usually a report under the code, because, really, the commissioner has no authority to declare there was an offence.
For timeliness, there needs to be some discretion to possibly impose administrative monetary penalties or even simply a prohibition on lobbying. There needs to be a spectrum, because right now, it's criminal, or a report to Parliament, and an attack to the reputation...and that's it. It would be nice to really think that one through, with all of the procedures that need to be put in place. It's been done elsewhere, so it is possible.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Thank you, Madame Bélanger. It's a pleasure to have you at our committee, and I want to say that I have enormous respect for your predecessor. I think she always felt the issue of the spirit of the act was very crucial. We've had situations, again, with two reports—from the Ethics Commissioner and the Commissioner of Lobbying—but the Federal Accountability Act didn't foresee every possible loophole. It couldn't, so the spirit of the act is crucial.
This is what I want to speak with you about this morning, because in every Parliament we deal with different sets of issues, different conundrums that we didn't face before. Our committee right now is dealing with the Facebook scandal. The issue of the sudden massive rise of very powerful U.S. data oligarchies is becoming a real concern. The Bank of Canada is actually saying that their power is now so great that it's actually threatening economic competitiveness in Canada.
In the United States we've seen Google, Facebook, and Amazon not just move very heavily into lobbying, but actually put key people into government positions because they do not want to be regulated. So this is the question I raised in my letter to you about Kevin Chan.
I know you're not in a position to talk about specifics, but the 20% rule, to me, is a very outmoded thought. If you have someone who is very connected to government, who can phone up and can meet politicians and be really friendly with them and meet with all senior ministers, his goal is to make sure that they really like him, like the company, and don't want to regulate him, and he doesn't meet the test of lobbying.
What do you think we need to do to ensure that there is greater compliance between giant companies like Facebook and the spirit of the act?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
The significant part of duties is a threshold for in-house lobbyists. Historically it's been interpreted quantitatively, rather than qualitatively because when you read “significant part of the duties”, you could think that “significant” also means the importance of the issue for them, but historically it's always been calculated in time. So it's 20%, meaning one day a week for about a month, total, and it has to be the total of the whole organization and not just one person, so you add up everybody's time.
The problem is that the act is written in such a way that it's not transparency by design; it's the reverse. You only have to register if you meet that 20%, so the onus is on the lobbyist to decide whether he meets that 20%, rather than the reverse, that you must register unless.... Then we need to have that discussion of whether you want every single in-house lobbyist to register. That's a policy decision. There must have been, at some point, a discussion when the act was enacted that you wanted someone to be paid and it had to be about a registerable activity. That's the second thing we need to look at. It has to be about the change of a state of affairs—about a law, about a regulation, about a program, about a policy, or asking for money. That's the second thing we need to look at.
The law is quite prescriptive in a way, and I think that needs to be fixed.
I hear you on the significant part of duties, and I will always interpret the law to meet the spirit of it, but I also have to look at the second step of whether it's an activity that is actually registerable.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Right.
I like this idea of transparency by design as something we should be considering.
On the issue of a significant threshold, the act is written for the average lobbyist who does the day-to-day job, knocking on doors, trying to sit down with their flip charts and stuff. But when you hire someone who has enormous political power, you're hiring them not to go knocking door-to-door; you're hiring them to make one phone call because when that person makes a phone call to the Prime Minister's Office, people pick up. The people with that kind of influence don't do that 20% of the day in order to register, but that's why they're hired.
It seems to me that some of the issues we dealt with in the last Parliament kept coming back to this 20% rule. Very powerful companies are going to hire very powerful people to make that one call to open a door to fix something, and they don't have to be registered. That's the question of how we address the 20% threshold in a fair way.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
I am bound by the way the law is written right now. I'll do what I can to look at the facts of the case and apply the law as best I can.
It was a priority back in 2012. One of my recommendations will be to eliminate it.
I can tell you that across the country there are a few provinces that have the threshold of a significant part of duties; the rest have a threshold of hours per year. Every time they have an opportunity, they also recommend getting rid of that.
The solution is not necessarily to look for the number of hours. It really is to give significance. What is the importance of the issues? In terms of looking at criteria, who do we want to register as lobbyists? It's not just about their time; it's also the importance of the issue. Maybe you'll have to think about whether you really want to involve everybody.
There might be some thresholds in number of employees, the operational budget, and so on. We might have to look at criteria to remove it, but I certainly understand what you're telling me.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
When the Federal Accountability Act was brought in, which we were very much involved in working with, there was a five-year prohibition for senior public officials to become lobbyists. However, there's no prohibition for lobbyists to become senior public officials, which is very much the modus operandi right now with Google in the United States.
We see Leslie Church, who was in the Liberal leader's office, then go to work for Google as its senior head of communications and public affairs, and she is now the chief of staff to Mélanie Joly, the key minister on many of these files.
Do we need to look at the issue? Who needs to lobby, when you can just have them hired as the chief of staff to advise the minister? It's corporate influence that's so much more direct than lobbying, but there is no prohibition, whereas the prohibition is that if she was chief of staff, she couldn't become a lobbyist.
Liberal
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
Right now, I can only regulate lobbyists. You are correct that there is no prohibition, but I can't really comment on that.
Liberal
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Good morning to you both. Thank you very much for coming.
I'll be giving some of my time to Mr. Sheehan this morning.
I want to ask you about a couple of things in the 2016-17 departmental results report. It seems to me that there was a big increase in the total number of registration activities during that year and in the number of times the registry information was accessed.
Was this a one-time increase, or do you feel that is this going to be the normal trend?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
I believe it will be a normal trend. We're preparing for the annual report right now.
I don't know if you can answer that. Has there been an increase? I think the number of registrants is steady now.
François Bertrand Director, Registration and Client Services, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
Yes.
Director, Registration and Client Services, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
The number of registered lobbyists over the years has pretty much remained the same, about 5,500 lobbyists registered at any one time. Of course, during the course of a year, there are lobbyists who do register, and then end their registration once the lobbying is completed. At any one time throughout the year, there are about 5,000 to 5,500 lobbyists registered.
In the monthly communication reports, there has been a slight increase over the years. It is higher than before, but it is stable now.
Liberal
Director, Registration and Client Services, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
Yes.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Also in the report, from 2014, when we look at the percentage of monthly communication reports that are accurate, that number seems to be dropping steadily, from 97% to 95%, to 93%.
Are these reports being filed inaccurately? What accounts for the decrease in accuracy of these reports?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
In the annual report, it will again be at close to 94% accuracy.
We verified the accuracy through reaching out to public office holders to let us know. We take about 5% of the monthly reports and we make a request. The inaccuracy is where they write down that a person was there and in fact they weren't, or it's a misspelling of a name, or there was an issue discussed and it's not on the list. It's very minor, which is why we can't say it's 100%, but there is nothing major in terms of accuracy.
