Under the Lobbying Act, there are offences for failure to register, lobbying while prohibited from registering, and in fact there have been prosecutions under the law. In our office, when the commissioner reaches the conclusion that there may have been an offence committed under the act, she is required under the act to refer the matter to a peace office, which are the words in the act. We refer to the RCMP here in Ottawa. In fact there have been four persons convicted of offences under the Lobbying Act in the last few years.
The first one, in 2013, was fined $7,500 for a failure to register lobbying activities. Earlier this year and last year there have been a couple of other convictions where one gentleman in Montreal was fined a total of $9,000 on four separate charges of failure to register, and here in Ottawa another fellow was fined $20,000 and a fourth gentleman was fined a grand total of $50,000 for three charges. It's under appeal now. There have been some serious penalties, but these are handed out by the courts and not the commissioner.