Information & Ethics committee  I guess there are two questions. In terms of an individual who would be communicating with a public office holder--which a parliamentary secretary is--they would need to determine whether an initial registration is filed. What is not required, because the parliamentary secretar

Information & Ethics committee  Again we're into the difference between the need to file an initial registration.... If the individual is communicating with a public office holder on a registerable activity--it's defined in the act as someone who is receiving payment to communicate for the making, development,

Information & Ethics committee  Again, if you're trying to capture the monthly communication with the DPOH, it does not have to be reported. But the lobbyist or the individual would still need to be filing a registration because that's still a registerable activity.

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of registration, we must constantly work on our system to ensure that lobbyists can register themselves. We have adopted many measures so that lobbyists can continue to do their work in the event of a technical difficulty. I am very proud of my team because we are always

Information & Ethics committee  If I understand correctly, you are asking whether I have the independence to do what I want. I would have to say yes. Absolutely. The government does not tell me when to do or not do an investigation. I have the budget and staff necessary to do what I think needs to be done. I am

Information & Ethics committee  As you said, our organization is fairly young, but there is always room for improvement. I created the position of deputy commissioner in order to consolidate all of the organization's functions in one place, in other words, human resources, finance, technology and information ma

Information & Ethics committee  Honestly, I cannot name any major hurdles. On our end, the legislation that came into force did not include the two-month transition period, as in 2005, and we experienced a backlog of registrations, as a result. The team had to work overtime to eliminate the backlog, on top of d

Information & Ethics committee  I will use investigations as an example. With the new legislation coming into force, we had to review all of our practices and procedures and make the necessary changes so that investigators could perform their duties, namely, administrative reviews and investigations. As for str

Information & Ethics committee  As I said, I have a budget of $4.6 million. So far, I would say that it is sufficient. But, as a small organization, I cannot do the same thing as a large department and take the money from another area if something unforeseen or urgent comes up. For instance, my decisions can b

Information & Ethics committee  One of the compliance measures we have in place is what we call media monitoring. If we see something in the media, we do a further analysis and determine whether these individuals may need to be registered. As I said, for instance, in the case in which we found roughly 300, 90%

Information & Ethics committee  No. I don't have any cases in front of me, but it's one of those cases, when you're looking at the articles talking about lobbying, in which on further analysis they weren't lobbying the federal government but were lobbying the province or the municipality.

Information & Ethics committee  That may be from the departmental performance report, which talks about the number of transactions.

Information & Ethics committee  We haven't in terms of actually going.... One of the things we've talked about is that as we're getting rid of the backlog, and now that the staff is free, we can do some analysis; we can actually call some of the organizations that have chosen not to register to figure out if i

Information & Ethics committee  You're saying “spread it around”. The one thing that's different with an organization versus a corporation for in-house lobbyists is that anyone who's communicating in an in-house organization, if they're paid, does not have to.... All of that cumulatively is added together, so i

Information & Ethics committee  One of the things we're looking at is once a lobbyist files, there are about seven steps for consultants and corporations from the filing of the registration until it hits the system. The performance indicators will allow us to figure out where in those steps we need to focus mor