More meddling makes more lobbying

One of the backdrop themes in the Snc-lavalin scandal has been the exposure of what many see as unseemly rounds of high-level corporate lobbying. We have Kevin Lynch, former clerk of the Privy Council and current chair of Snc-lavalin, making a phone call to the current clerk on behalf of the company. Last October, Snc-lavalin CEO Neil Bruce sent a lengthy letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pleading for a personal meeting to “discuss a matter of some urgency.”

Whether these communications, on top of others from the company to the government, are appropriate is debatable. For high moralists, however, such corporate lobbying has long been seen as a disreputable sub-industry that constantly warps government decision-making.

One veteran lobbyist/observer of the Ottawa scene portrays the SNC scandal as the underbelly of Canada’s version of The Deep State: “This Deep State has more power than the elected MPS and Ministers who are supposed to run the country,” writes Dan Donovan, a lobbyist turned pundit in Ottawa Life magazine. “These people are the lobbyists who ply their trade with the efficiency of a surgeon’s scalpel. They ensure that banks, telecoms, airlines, special interest groups and large corporations like SNC… can skirt the rules.”

Other legal observers said the degree to which SNC-LAVAlin has been able to manipulate the inner circles of the Trudeau Liberal government confirms “a perception in Canada that corporations receive preferential treatment” from government.

If only it were that simple. Thousands of corporate executives could rightly argue that corporations are constantly responding to threats from politicians and policy-makers. Rather than receiving preferential treatment, corporations are predominantly at risk of receiving punishing policies that undermine their operations. Government taxes confiscate 40 per cent of Canada’s GDP. With those funds and associated economic power, politicians continue to expand regulations and programs that interfere with corporate operations and disturb the markets for every product and service.

Corporations have no choice but to lobby vote-seeking politicians who are constantly harassing business with a succession of populist initiatives. Last week’s headline example was the release of an interim report from the Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare. The report calls for a new National Drug Agency as an essential first step in “improving access to drugs, controlling costs, improving efficiency and coordination.”

The report is an instant trigger for escalating lobbying battles in Ottawa and across the provinces. Among other things, the new drug agency would be charged with “negotiations with manufacturers on drug prices and terms of listing.” A national “evidence-based” drug formulary will be developed with the help of citizens groups, clinical experts and plan administrators.

Line up the lobbyists: drugmakers, wholesalers, insurance providers, pharmacy companies, medical experts, nurse and doctor groups, patient activists. Merely by establishing a preliminary advisory council, the government will be launching a decade-long pharmacare-lobbying extravaganza.

When governments assume so much non-market power to overthrow existing business models and markets, and favour one sector over another, corporations have no choice but to seek to influence decisions — which is why lobbying is a growing business in Ottawa. The latest report from the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying in Canada shows the number of registered lobbyists has increased 30 per cent from 6,800 in 2009 to more than 9,000 in 2017-18.

The top federal agencies listed by lobbyists as targets (by number of mentions) are: the House of Commons (35,155); Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (29,019); the Prime Minister’s Office (28,614); Finance Canada (23,784); and the Senate (22,871).

To those of us uninitiated in this backroom business of influencing policy, the high rank of the PMO as a lobbying target is a bit of a surprise. On the other hand, Unifor’s union leader Jerry Dias keeps trying to get the ear of the prime minister as he scrambles for the federal government to do something about General Motors’ plan to shut down its Oshawa assembly plant. Last month, Dias — a registered lobbyist — told a CBC radio noon-hour host that he had been scheduled to meet with Trudeau that morning, but the meeting was cancelled because the prime minister was neck deep in the SNC scandal.

A recent ipolitics weekly update on lobbing activity in Ottawa listed three professional lobbyists who had registered to work on the PMO and other agencies to help the Campbell’s company “mitigate costs” of Canada’s new 10-per-cent tariff on imported soups and broths. Other lobbyists listed in the update include the Alberta Masonry Council, Value Village, assorted cannabis firms, the Dairy Farmers of Manitoba, the Japanese Auto Manufacturers Association, a blockchain association, and Unilever. The Unilever objective is apparently to influence Ottawa on the miracle benefits of something called a “circular economy.”

The line between corruption and lobbying has been the subject of much academic discussion over the years. One distinction is that lobbying involves influencing policy-makers while corruption involves influencing policy enforcers. Many have concluded that SNC and Trudeau crossed that line.

Whatever the case with SNC, the explosion of lobbying is not a manifestation of corporate sleaze and business control over the economy. It is the opposite. Corporate lobbying is the product of the never-ending attempts by Big Government to control economic activity. The bigger and more powerful the government — along the spectrum from market democracies to total dictatorships — the more corporations are drawn into the business influencing policy one way or another. Less government equals less lobbying and little corruption.