Perennial suspicions about the lobbying industry prompted a reform bill Monday aimed at protecting the integrity of government decision-making, but it’s a pretty underwhelming effort.
Attorney General David Eby introduced legislation that makes modest changes to address one concern about former government big shots who leave public office and sign on as lobbyists. The bill imposes a two-year ban on former public office-holders and former senior staff seeking to lobby government.
Curbing lobbyists to some degree was a fixture in both the NDP and Green election platforms. But it looks as if the government is waiting for results of a more comprehensive review it plans to launch before it makes any dramatic overhauls.
Monday’s bill is a minor adjustment that leaves some of the campaign promises, such as tougher fines, unfulfilled. And it comes with an out clause that can void the intent of the bill entirely. If it’s ruled in the public interest, the two-year cooling-off period barring an ex-office holder from lobbying can be waived entirely.
Nonetheless, Eby pumped it up as a “sweeping prohibition” that will put people at the centre of government decisions. Even the most enthusiastic reading of his three-page bill makes clear it will take a bit more to accomplish that.
There were already some restrictions against moving from government to lobbying, even before the bill. Conflict-of-interest law bars former cabinet ministers and parliamentary secretaries for two years from “making representations” on others’ behalf. That covers some lobbying activities, but not all.
And public-service policy restricts former senior officials from lobbying in general, but only for one year after leaving government.
The NDP bill makes it a uniform two-year prohibition and applies to cabinet ministers and a broad swath of officials throughout the public sector. Eby said three people are currently registered as former public office-holders who are lobbying, and the bill could have a direct impact on them and others.
The bill also requires lobbyists to disclose the names of any staff person working in a minister’s or MLA’s office with whom they speak. Previously, they had to disclose the name of just the minister or MLA.
Some people in the field think government could make more headway toward shedding light on who is influencing public decision-making by flipping the onus. Instead of requiring lobbyists to list the names of ministers and their secretaries, ministers and senior officials could be required to post the names and the clients of all the lobbyists who contact them. That idea has been rejected by politicians leery of the workload involved in researching and listing everyone who comes to talk to them.
And while the focus of disclosing lobbying is widened under the bill, there is a whole range of less-senior officials who get lobbied just as routinely as the ministers do. Some would be just as inclined to move over to the lobbying sphere after leaving government, although the track record of ex-officials who made it big as lobbyists is pretty scanty.
The same day the bill was introduced, the lobbyist registrar filed an annual report to the legislature. It asked the government once again to “take this opportunity to look closely at the legislative reforms we suggested in 2013.”
The most important one was to change the law so lobbyists report only actual lobbying rather than prospective lobbying. The requirement to list at the outset who the lobbyist intends to contact creates a lot of confusing paperwork about meetings that often never happen.
That 2013 report also hinted at how hard it is to regulate the field. The commissioner summarized input from unnamed people who stressed how important personal connections and the influence of personal relationships are in lobbying.
One questioned whether a cooling-off period would reduce any access advantage, since personal connections can last for years.
One former minister said: “When you start talking about how you actually get results, it becomes much more complex. There’s a lot of indirect lobbying. … That’s what they do when they know a public office-holder well.”
The lobbyist registrar did 115 compliance reviews last year and 16 investigations of lobbyists’ activities, leading to 11 administrative fines for infractions.
