Thank you for the question.
The distinction is related to the responsibility that in-house lobbyists have to corporations and businesses.
We are one of the few regimes in the world that include in-house lobbyists in a lobbying regime, so we have gone a lot farther than most regimes that look only at consultant lobbyists.
The reason there are some distinctions is that within the whole population of in-house lobbyists, there are a lot of different types of people. For example, we could be talking about small business owners, we could be talking about heads of charitable organizations or we could be talking about CEOs of major corporations and major multinational corporations.
One of the beauties of the Lobbying Act is that it has such a broad scope, and it's very comprehensive in its reach in terms of capturing both in-house and consultant lobbyists. There are roughly 9,000 consultants currently registered within the current regime, which is very significant, I would say, but it's hard to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach for all of the lobbyists within that population. That's why the approach in the legislation was adopted the way it was.
Absolutely, it's time to take a look at it to see how it works and whether there are opportunities for improvement within the current circumstances, but overall, I think that explains the rationale behind the approach that's been part of the legislation.