The lobby hobby

>> Quebec labour, biz agree on weak lobby law:
a FAQ update

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Care to wine and dine, seduce or otherwise persuade a provincial politician to manipulate the public purse strings in your favour? There’s no law against doing so—until now, that is. While federal legislation has placed some meek controls over the practice since the Mulroney era, Quebec’s long been an official lobbyist free-for-all, a situation that will change later this year, as the details of the upcoming Bill 80 are currently being written up by a National Assembly committee. The plan has already inspired strange bedfellows and worries from a top expert, as displayed in these questions and answers.

Why does Quebec suddenly need a lobbying law? Scandal. In late January it came out that PQ Director General Raymond Bréard had—just before joining the government—been paid $200,000 by lobby firm Oxygène 9 to persuade his future colleagues to adopt positions favourable to private firms. The day after Bréard quit, Gilles Baril, National Resources and Regions Minister and Premier Landry’s longtime protégé, also walked the plank after it was discovered that he vacationed in Mexico with André Desroches, the head of Oxygène 9.

Who would a lobby law affect? Initially Quebec’s lobby law would have applied strictly to professional lobbyists and business interests. This didn’t please business. “It’s like vegetarians passing laws about meat,” says Pierre Prévost, VP of the Conseil du patronat, a group that defends the interests of local business. “Most know that lobbyists are citizens, not crooks. We found it strange that businesses were described as lobbyists, yet representatives of community groups, including unions, weren’t. It seemed paradoxical because in Quebec unions play an enormous role in lobbying. We say at least let’s be fair. If we’re constrained by all sorts of procedures they should be too.”

Surely Quebec’s organized labour would guard their advantage? Not so. “We presented a brief saying that groups like the Conseil du patronat and the Chamber of Commerce should be exempted along with us,” says Jean-Pierre Néron, representative of the Fédération des travailleurs du Québec (FTQ) union. “We should be aiming this legislation against full-time, professional lobbyists. We want to prevent unethical activities but we’re not against lobbying. Lobbying is everywhere in life. Like when you’re a child, you go to your mother and ask her to speak to your dad about something, that’s lobbying. People have always been doing that and the aim is to stop the dishonest stuff. Organizations like the Conseil du patronat don’t lobby for their own interests, they do it for their membership. That’s not the same as a professional lobbyist with a contract from a company who says ‘I’ll try to influence such-and-such a minister.’”

How does Canada’s leading lobbyist watchdog describe that point of view? “Unreasonable,” says Duff Conacher, Ottawa-based chief of Democracy Watch. “The FTQ is saying that their lobbying activities would never cause problems of conflicts or ethical dilemmas. That’s simply not true because government ministers could just as easily come out of the unions as they could come out of the corporate world. The FTQ is saying that it’s alright for such politicians to meet in secret with the unions they used to work with.
Yeah, but what’s wrong with exempting not-for-profit do-gooder groups from lobbying restrictions? “For the unions to recommend that all not-for-profit groups be exempt, well that’s a dangerous stand to take,” says Conacher. “For example, the Canadian Bankers Association and the Canadian Petroleum Association would be exempted, as would many others who say they exist not to make profits but to represent the interests of their members. It’s a difficult line to draw. For lobbying, everybody thinks they’re a public interest group. What industry would admit they’re pushing for things that aren’t in the public’s interest?”

What changes would the watchdog recommend to the anti-lobby law? “Justice Minister Paul Bégin says Quebec’s law will be 70 per cent as strong as the federal law, but the federal law has tons of loopholes,” says Conacher, who suggests, for starters, that the itineraries of government ministers be posted on the Net for all to see who’s meeting with whom. In one rare instance when he obtained such an itinerary, Conacher says he learned that one junior finance minister met 49 times with banking industry representatives during the rewriting of the Bank Act in 1997 and zero times with consumer groups during that same period. Conacher also suggests that anybody “who spends a lot of time” campaigning for a particular cause should have to register as a lobbyist, and wants a “cooling off period” of five years for a former minister and two years for a former senior bureaucrat before becoming a lobbyist. Quebec’s proposed purgatory is a year or two. :