Information & Ethics committee  To answer your question simply, yes, I think the registrar and the commissioner of lobbying can be helpful by using these instruments. They're not statutory, which means that if somebody chooses to challenge them in court, they could be overturned. What that means is you have to think about them in the first place.

Information & Ethics committee  Bruce? This is why my lawyer is here with me.

Information & Ethics committee  To move to something I could talk about at the very end, what is terribly important in this act, because of the types of situations you've talked about, is that public office holders know what lobbying is and what the obligations are of lobbyists. When somebody is talking to them, they have the reaction of saying--and more and more are, by the way, because they call my office about this--“I can't find you on the registry.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe in many cases I am. The power that the existing law gives the registrar, and this is continued with the commissioner of lobbying, is to issue interpretation bulletins. When you run into something that nobody thought of--because you can't think of all of these situations, there are so many situations--interpretation bulletins allow the registrar to say, look, when we run into this type of situation, here's the way I'm going to look at that.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, it often happens. I will ask our Director of Operations, Pierre Richard-Desjardins, to answer your question. His people are the ones who respond to such queries.

Information & Ethics committee  No, I don't think so. As I said, for something that has a relatively simple intent, this act has twists and turns. If somebody is hired by a firm and is an employee of the firm, not under contract but an employee of the firm--and here's another trigger under the act. If it's a commercial corporation and the entire lobbying effort of the firm is more than 20% of one person's time, even if that's accumulated--if they have 20 people who are doing this activity and each one of them is doing it 1% of their time--that triggers the requirement for that company to register.

Information & Ethics committee  I would have to say that's a grey zone. If somebody complained to us about that, we would look into the matter to see how likely it was that there was a connection--you can see why this is a dicey business--between your.... I would like to point out something that we may not get to in this presentation, with respect to the current law and what Bill C-2provides, because this has not been given very much press anywhere.

Information & Ethics committee  I think we looked into that. Do you know, Bruce?

Information & Ethics committee  Would you be doing it if you weren't a director of the company?

Information & Ethics committee  I just want to make sure I get the facts of the situation. Are you an inside or an outside director?

Information & Ethics committee  Okay, so that would be more than your regular travel and that sort of thing. We would consider that to be a consultant lobbyist if part of your duties were communicating with the government.

Information & Ethics committee  Are you talking to Ottawa about what's good for the company?

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think I'm aware of any other jurisdictions that have imposed that kind of ban. There are other ways it's implemented—through conflict of interest codes and things like that—much as we have here in the conflict of interest code. But as I pointed out at the beginning, the amount of lobbying legislation that's out there is pretty astounding, and it's being changed because recently lobbying has received a lot of attention worldwide.

Information & Ethics committee  There is some variation among the categories about what they have to declare when they do the re-registration. Part of it was just to make sure that the data has some integrity. Along with the renewal is the idea of telling us when you quit, if you're no longer on the assignment.

Information & Ethics committee  Exactly, and they just didn't do it.