Information & Ethics committee  Before passing over to Karen Shepherd, I would like to mention one of the factors that have contributed to the delay in getting registrations. One year ago we had fewer than 2,000 registrations and lobbyists. Now in some categories we have ten times that number of lobbyists. Go ahead, Karen.

Information & Ethics committee  I agree completely. The current act is totally silent on any obligations whatsoever for the registrar to do this, so it's sort of volunteer work that we've been doing. It's very hard to get money from Treasury Board if you don't have something explicit in your legislation that says you're supposed to do it.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. This applies to lobbyists working for both commercial and non-commercial organizations.

Information & Ethics committee  However, if someone else in that company is also engaged in lobbying, we would have to look at the total number of hours of lobbying done by the company.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. We don't exactly receive a flood of complaints, but we do receive letters from time to time. In some cases, the letters are anonymous, but a number are signed and indicate that a given person or a given company is engaged in lobbying but is not registered. From time to time, we receive complaints about the behaviour of lobbyists who are former public employees.

Information & Ethics committee  There are 10 investigations currently under way.

Information & Ethics committee  Previously, before the current system was put in place, there were no investigations under the legislation. So, we had none last year.

Information & Ethics committee  It does. In fact, it goes right down to...that would be called informal lobbying. People can, if they wish, describe exactly what they're going to be doing, or even grassroots lobbying, even if you're just going to exhort people to contact someone.

Information & Ethics committee  Not in our legislation. There are other pieces of legislation, in the United States, for example, where that idea has crept in, but no, it's not a requirement.

Information & Ethics committee  It may, in the extreme, add something. If someone were spending $10 million on a given lobbying campaign--I'm just making these numbers up--that might be important public knowledge, but just to know how much lobbyists make.... I know that parliamentarians had this debate--

Information & Ethics committee  Oh, how much money they've spent on a campaign or things like that.

Information & Ethics committee  As I said, in the extreme, that might be of interest to the public. In the normal run of spending--a thousand dollars here, a thousand dollars there--I'm not sure it would be of interest. But I don't have an informed view on that, I must say.

Information & Ethics committee  I can say that the Americans are much more seized with that notion than we are, and the amounts. Not every one of their legislatures, as I said, has exactly the same rules, but they are much more seized with how much money you are allowed to spend and the types of gifts while lobbying in particular.

Information & Ethics committee  The current act is totally silent on the obligations of public office holders. When I speak to public office holders--and I've been to various deputy management teams--the first question after I make this presentation is almost always, “So what does this mean for us? What are our obligations?

Information & Ethics committee  To answer the question directly, to my knowledge Bill C-2 doesn't change the structure of the interpretation bulletins or the outcomes. What will change is that a registrar's office that we can speak to, if there is interest, that is structured to have a function that will actually look into these grey areas, create interpretation bulletins, and have them tested by the courts if necessary by having a decision made...that type of registration, that type of office, is not what has existed in the past.