Who lobbies Trudeau’s cabinet the most?

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Jordan Heath Rawlings When you hear that somebody or something was lobbying the government, what do you picture? A pleasant conversation about a political issue, a quid pro quo in a back room somewhere between a business business in a government, something shady or something totally above board, a normal part of the political process. What is the difference really, between a business lobbying a member of parliament and you booking a meeting with an MP to push your representative towards your own positions on climate or taxes or whatever? Is there a difference? Lobbying is a strange thing. There are a million ways that it can happen, but only some of them actually count as lobbying. What you picture as lobbying may or may not be among those. Lobbying is technically reported and recorded and publicly available, but not always, and certainly not in any way that really makes it useful, that lets you see who is talking to who on behalf of whom, and how often, at least not until now. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Roberto Rocha is a data journalist at the recently launched investigative Journalism Foundation, where he helped one of their very first projects. Hello, Roberto.

Roberto Rocha Hey, how’s it going?

Jordan It’s going well. Thanks so much for joining us.

Roberto Rocha My pleasure.

Jordan Why don’t we start with kind of the concept at hand here, since I think while myself and perhaps a bunch of our listeners don’t properly understand it officially. So in general, what is lobbying? And more importantly, when we talk about it, what’s the official definition of when something qualifies as lobbying?

Roberto Rocha Yeah, lobbying is something that gets, there’s probably a little bit of confusion around it. It has some negative connotations of rich companies trying to get favors from the government, trying to influence policies. And that is part of lobbying, but it’s not exclusively part of lobbying. Lobbying is really any kind of communication between government and the people who the government affects. And that can be citizens, that can be nonprofit organizations, that can be activist groups, and that can be also companies and corporations. It is a way for not only the stakeholders to maybe influence policy or push bills a certain way, but it’s also a way for just government and all these other parts of society to keep track of each other. To have a conversation, going to understand what each other is doing, what government is planning, what’s on the legislative agenda so all these stakeholders can say, prepare their activities for the year. So your investigation looks at who lobbies cabinet the most, who gets FaceTime, all of that kind of stuff. And we’re going to get into that.

Roberto Rocha But first, just because I think you’re right and it is a little bit confusing, maybe can you explain, like, what’s the difference between a union or a lobbying group working on behalf of a corporation getting in front of any MP and me going to my MP’s office and happening to get a meeting and telling him I want him to do X, Y or Z for our riding.

Roberto Rocha Right. It’s a great question. So there is an official definition of lobbying. There are rules in Canada that govern how lobbying is conducted. There is an office of Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada and lays out some rules, right? If you want to be a lobbyist, if you want to lobby the government, you have to register as a lobbyist. You have to go to the website and say, I am lobbying. My name is Roberto. I am lobbying on behalf of the Investigative Journalism Foundation, and I want to lobby on these topics specifically, and I plan on lobbying from this date to this other date. Okay? And then when I actually communicate with government official, I have to declare that that communication was made on set date with these government officials. I have to name them, and I have to also mention briefly what the subject matter of the conversation was. Now, those are the rules, but like many rules, there are loopholes, there are exceptions. This makes it seem like it’s possible to know everybody who lobbies, and it’s possible to know every time a lobbying communication happens. Unfortunately, that’s not the case when we talk about lobby groups working on behalf of someone, and that can be any kind of union or any kind of business or corporation.

Jordan How does that arrangement work, and who are these groups?

Roberto Rocha Right. So let’s go back a little bit and talk about the two main types of lobbyists that exist. And these are legally defined categories of lobbyists. You have consultant lobbyists, and these are lobbyists that work for a specialized lobbying firm that offers their services for companies, organizations that want to do lobbying. Right? There are lots of them in Ottawa. You maybe heard of them. There’s a suspect strategy. There’s blue sky group. There’s national government relations. These are professional lobbyists who lobby on behalf of paying clients. These are called consultants. Now, there’s another category called in house lobbyists, and these are people who work for a company and do lobbying for that company exclusively. Right. A lot of big associations have their own in house lobbyists, right? Associations that represent, let’s say, energy companies or food and beverage companies or unions. They have their own in house lobbyists that talk to government on their behalf.

Jordan So let’s talk about what you did and what the IJF did, first, explain what this investigation actually was, and then second, why did you want to perform this investigation? What don’t we know about who is lobbying who?

Roberto Rocha We undertook this investigation, first of all, because one of our main topics of coverage is lobbying and more generally, the influence of money in politics. And we have the data for it, right. One of the things we did do regularly every day is we harvest lobbying data, not only from the federal government, but from every province. And we standardize it and we put it in a public facing database so that anyone can go and see who has lobbied who, not only in the federal government, but every province. Because every province has their own lobbying regime. And this makes it very hard to detect, let’s say coordinated lobbying efforts. Let’s say one company wants to influence climate law not only in the federal, but in different provinces, right. You would have to go to all of these websites individually and see if there’s a pattern. Well, we do that for you. So if you search for one company name, you’ll see all the times they lobbied all over the country, right. The main reason we do this is to keep an eye on these things, but also just to showcase this specific story that we did, is who lobbied cabinet members the most, federal cabinet members the most, is to showcase our data and what we can do with it. And not only what we can do with it, but what subscribers who get access to our data can also do with it. So we wanted to start at the very top and show which are the lobby groups that get this privilege of meeting the most important politicians in the country.

Jordan So tell me about what you found and maybe start with the moment that you’ve run all this data and you’re looking at the results. What was the very first thing that stood out to you about lobbyists meeting with cabinet?

Roberto Rocha The most striking thing is how awful the data we have in this country is.

Jordan Explain that.

Roberto Rocha Sure thing. So we tend to have this idea these days that data is sort of an absolute truth, right? That it is the great decider of what is factual and what is not. There is like the cult of data these days. And it’s important to understand that data are created by people. And people make mistakes. People can get lazy. Right? So you see that reflected a lot in all sorts of data from the government.

Jordan Let’s talk specifics here.

Roberto Rocha When a lobbyist declares, by the way, it’s lobbyists themselves, they have to declare all these things. It’s all self declared, right. They put on the website themselves. Lobbyists many times don’t know how to spell the name of the companies they represent. They are not consistent in how they register things. They will call their company, let’s say Amazon in one registration, and then Amazon Canada in another registration, and then Amazon Inc. in another registration. Right?

Roberto Rocha Computers are very dumb, so they don’t know that all these things are the same company. So if you’re trying to count how many times, let’s say Amazon was lobbied, you will not get an accurate count because all these three different examples I gave you are counted differently, let’s say by adding up the different records. So the thing that struck me the most is how much time and effort is needed to standardize the data, clean it up, make it consistent, make it uniform, so that you can actually get insights out of it without going into too much detail. Because I think we could go down a rabbit hole here.

Jordan Oh, my God. Yes.

Roberto Rocha And I would find it really interesting. I’m not sure if all our listeners have time for it, but maybe if you could quickly explain how you go about cleaning that up and standardizing it when it’s so messy.

Roberto Rocha Thankfully, there are a lot of great tools these days that do a lot of the dirty work for you. You don’t have to do it manually. There are tools that rely on machine learning and AI that detect patterns, that find things that are kind of similar but not the same, and that ask you, hey, I found these three records that look kind of the same. Do you want me to standardize them into a single form? And that’s a big time saver.

Jordan So let’s talk in general, then, about the big takeaways that you published in the first article that came out of this data. Who does, in general, get the most face time with members of Trudeau’s cabinet and maybe before then, Harper’s cabinet, like when we talk about really high level lobbying in this country, who’s doing it?

Roberto Rocha They tend to be big associations that represent a lot of individual stakeholders, right. If we’re going to talk about the single biggest lobbyists in Canada, the one that met the most with all these ministers, it’s the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. And this is an association that represents all the cities in Canada, or hundreds and hundreds of cities in Canada, right. That seems fairly logical and even harmless in a way. And good.

Jordan Yeah, it’s not surprising.

Roberto Rocha A lot of the top lobbyists are pretty much what you would expect. Another big one is Uniform, which is one of the biggest unions in Canada. Right. They meet with cabinet members to discuss things that affect workers. They were really active during the first few months of COVID to talk about wage subsidies and so on, protections, health protections for workers. Another major lobbyist is the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, another huge association of factories, companies who make stuff in Canada. So those parts aren’t very surprising, but as you start going down the list, I feel interesting things come up. Right. You’ll see that Rio Tinto is a single company, the single corporation that lobbied the cabinet the most, it’s the only non association. They talk a lot to have the nice little dashboard right here. They talk a lot to global affairs and to innovation, science, and economic development.

Roberto Rocha Right. What do they do?

Roberto Rocha It’s a mining company. So they talk about mining things. It’s an international company, right. So they talk about mining in a global context. They offer their opinion on maybe climate issues or climate regulations that would affect them, things like that.

Jordan You just mentioned climate issues and international affairs. That’s my other question. When various lobbying groups or individual companies meet with the government, are we able to tell what policy area they’re discussing the most?

Roberto Rocha And if so, what gets lobbied the most on behalf of businesses or unions? Yeah, that’s where it gets a little trickier to keep an eye on these things. So when lobbyists register for lobbying, they have to declare what their intended outcomes are, but in general, in their lobbying goals. But every time a lobbyist actually meets with a government official, we don’t know what was actually discussed in that meeting. There is no obligation to declare that.

Jordan I see.

Roberto Rocha There’s no obligation to disclose the letters that were sent, the memos, the phone conversations, if that’s what happens, a transcript of the meeting, there is no obligation to disclose that. And that’s one of the big flaws of our lobbying regime, that a lot of democracy kind of watchdogs will say.

Jordan One of the interesting things I thought about going into this conversation with you and looking through the data is the image of lobbying versus the reality, if that makes any sense. And we’ve kind of gotten at it a little bit. But I want to talk about the more insidious stuff. You know, when you say this corporation has been lobbying the government to people, or like this minister was meeting with lobbyists, we have this image of, just to use climate change because you mentioned it, oil industry executives like showing up in a trench coat to offer some compromises. If only we could get rid of some of these standards. And I guess what I’m asking is, do we know how different that is from the reality? And how do we determine where the line is between —– and the kind of lobbying that we discussed, which is cities approaching the government on behalf of municipal affairs.

Roberto Rocha Yeah, that’s a really hard thing to measure from the outside and especially with the data we have. Right? Yeah. All we can measure is who’s declared that they actually met with an official.

Jordan Right.

Roberto Rocha It’s all self-declared. So it’s an open secret in Ottawa that a lot of lobbying goes undeclared. It’s sort of like shadow networking. Common example that’s kind of ask any Hill reporter, they kind of all know that this happens.

Roberto Rocha But let’s say a minister or an advisor to the minister, or a policy wonk for a minister is at a restaurant in Ottawa and a lobbyist happens to be there, says, oh, hello, I didn’t know you came here, let me buy you a drink, and they start talking policy. That is lobbying in a sense, right. It’s trying to influence a government official, but that’s not going to get recorded. Right. That wasn’t done through the official channels, and who’s going to know anyway? Also, lobbying doesn’t get recorded when it is initiated by a public official only when it is initiated by a lobbyist, in most cases. Right. So those kind of communications also don’t get recorded. So if the government reaches out to a union lobbyist or to an oil company lobbyist and they say, we have some questions about blah, blah blah, that’s not lobbying because it came from the other side.

Jordan Yeah, that’s it?

Roberto Rocha That’s what the regulations say.

Jordan So is their pernicious lobbying that happens undetected?

Roberto Rocha I think most certainly there is. It’s just very hard to analyze it with data, which is why one of our goals is to do a good enough job with the data we have that people will leak to us, that we will have whistleblowers come to us and tell us what’s going on that isn’t being talked about.

Jordan In the meantime, while we wait for that to happen, which would be probably pretty amazing for you guys, and probably useful for the general public as well, what kinds of things could be done to the lobbying process?

Roberto Rocha And we talk about transparency and the lack of it in Canadian government all the time, but what kinds of things could be done to the lobbying process that would make it easier for citizens to find out who’s been lobbying their officials? And then, to your point, more importantly, what was actually discussed, and was the official influenced by this discussion? Yeah, those are great questions. There has been a lot of actually lobbying, of course, to revise the lobbying act lobbying rules, to give it more teeth. But yeah, one of those things that you just mentioned is disclose the contents of actual communications of actual meetings. Right. If you want to know what was actually discussed in the meeting, you often have to file an access to information request, which can take a long time, sometimes years, to be disclosed. Sometimes it comes back redacted. So that’s kind of useless. We need stricter penalties for non compliance. Right now, the lobbying act doesn’t have much teeth. There’s not really any punishment for not following the rules very well. Another thing that could help a lot is to reduce some of these loopholes. Right. There is sort of a loophole that if you’re an inhouse lobbyist, you only have to declare your lobbying if lobbying represents a significant part of your duties. So how do you define significant part, first of all, and does that mean that company can ask an intern to communicate with a government official and it doesn’t have to be registered because that’s not part of his significant part of his duties. He’s just there just a one off thing he did. So there are all these loopholes that keep us in the dark about what’s fully happening. So this is my last question, and this is not in any way intended as a knock on this investigation because I think it’s incredibly valuable. And as you said, hopefully it gets better and better as we get more information. With all that you’ve said about loopholes and things not being reported and the regulations, which don’t seem that tight when you look at the data set that you’ve got now, what percentage confidence do you think you have that you’re capturing everybody who’s making appeals on policy to government officials? That’s so hard. I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t. I don’t know what percentage of lobbying the data that we have actually captures. I hope it’s enough that it’s significant. That offers at least a pretty good idea of what’s happening. But with all these loopholes I mentioned, it’s really hard to give an answer on that. That’s fair enough. As so often is the case when talking about government transparency, we kind of just don’t know what we don’t know. Right? That’s it.

Jordan That’s it.

Roberto Rocha The best we can do is be really clear about the uncertainties, that this is just what was declared, but it doesn’t mean that it’s all that’s happening.

Jordan Roberto, thank you so much for this. Congratulations on the launch of this project, and it will be really interesting to see what kind of data you continue to dig up in the months to come.

Roberto Rocha Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Jordan Roberto Rocha of the Investigative Journalism Foundation. If you would like to poke around their lobbying tool or one of their other public interest databases, you can go to the ijf.org. That was the big story. For more, you can head to the Big Storypodcast CA. You should know by now where to find us. We are on Twitter at the Big Story FPN. We are available via email. Hello at the bigstorypodcast CA. A reminder we love getting story ideas. We’ve gotten a whole lack of them since we came back for the new year, which is amazing, and we’re working on some of them right now. And you can call us, leave us a voicemail 4169-355-9935. The Big Story is anywhere and everywhere you listen to podcasts. It’s definitely on smart speakers if you ask them to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.