Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me. It is an honour to appear before you as part of the review of Canada's Lobbying Act. I am here today in my capacity as an academic researcher and as the founder of a research project called “Lobbying and governance in Canada”, which I established with a professor named Christopher Cooper from the University of Ottawa.
My remarks today are based on several years of empirical research on the federal government's registry of lobbyists, on Canadian political institutions and on the role of lobbying in contemporary democratic governance. I have three introductory points that I'd like to highlight very briefly.
The first is that lobbying is not an anomaly in a modern democracy. In a pluralistic society, it is normal for companies, associations, unions, organizations and other organized groups to seek to make their views known to public decision-makers.
The issue today is not the existence of lobbying as such, but rather the conditions under which it is carried out and the framework within which it is regulated in order to preserve the values of democracy, namely transparency, fairness, integrity and public trust in institutions.
The second point I'd like to emphasize is that lobbying is a multidimensional phenomenon. It's not just about expertise, nor is it solely about influence and privileged access to power. Our academic work as part of the research project shows that lobbying combines several dimensions at once. It involves the exchange of information and it also involves sector-specific expertise and to a certain extent, consultation. It also involves strategies for exerting influence and strategies for gaining access to power. All of this takes place within the context of the development of long-term relationships between political institutions and certain interest groups and civil society actors in Canada.
My third and final point is that, in the Canadian parliamentary system—as we have thoroughly documented in our research—lobbying strategies follow the actual distribution of power within our system. In other words, lobbyists specifically target the areas where decision-making influence is strongest. I am thinking, in particular, of the executive branch of government, government departments, but also certain parliamentary actors who hold strategic positions, such as parliamentary secretaries.
Finally, I would like to highlight a significant limitation of the current system. The federal system allows us to track communications, the parties involved, and the institutions targeted. We have information, but it's not perfect. On the other hand, it does not allow us to measure the amounts invested and spent on lobbying. I don't want to reduce influence to a matter of money, but for a researcher like me, this aspect of the information still tells us about the intensity of lobbying efforts, the means of mobilization and certain power imbalances that may exist among the interests exerting pressure on the government.
From this perspective, I would like to emphasize today that the lobbying commissioner's recommendation to improve the disclosure of certain sources of lobbying funding strikes me as very important, because it would allow us to shed more light on the resources that support lobbying efforts without significantly disrupting the overall structure of the act.
I would like to conclude by saying that, based on our research project, successful modernization of the legislation should aim for meaningful transparency that is proportionate and better adapted to the contemporary realities of power so that we can have more information.
To conclude, I repeat: The point is not to deny the existence of lobbying, but rather to ensure that it is carried out in a manner more consistent with the requirements of a modern democracy.
Thank you.