Nearly a year and a half after new legislation created penalties of up to $25,000 for B.C. lobbyists who don't publicly register their activities, no fines have been doled out and only 1.5 full-time employees are currently assigned to investigate cases of non-compliance.
Registrar of Lobbyists Elizabeth Denham said that for the first year after April 1, 2010, when the Lobbyist Registration Amendment Act gave new enforcement powers to the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists for British Columbia (ORL), the office has focused on education.
As of April, the ORL had 634 active registrations in the B.C. Lobbyists Registry. More than half their lobbying efforts are focused on health, environment and energy issues. In the last five months, Denham said the office has shifted toward enforcement.
“I think there are significant numbers of unregistered lobbyists [in B.C.],” she said.
“The problem is that we have no real way of knowing because pretty much anyone can be a lobbyist. The profession is not regulated or circumscribed like lawyers, for example. ”
Denham noted that, of the four investigations that have been launched, three have been closed with no penalties.
“We determined the lobbyists were non-compliant due to misunderstanding of the rules, so it doesn't make sense – it's not in the public interest – to proceed further,” she said. “And all three fixed the problems either by registering or amending their current registration.”
The remaining investigation, which she deemed “serious,” is still underway.
In a letter accompanying the ORL's annual report, Denham noted that non-registration by B.C. lobbyists can be either inadvertent or deliberate.
She pointed out the challenges of locating people in the latter category.
“Sometimes, the ORL is alerted to intentional non-compliance by a concerned member of the public, public office holder, or other lobbyist. Other times, we discern unregistered lobbying by noting and tracking government priorities and media coverage of current events and issues and comparing the results of these scans to information in the registry.”
Denham said her enforcement resources are extremely limited.
“We really only have 1.5 staff that are actually doing the work on the ground, so it's a pretty skinny staff.”
Dermod Travis, managing director of Victoria-based B.C. government watchdog Integrity BC, voiced concern about the ORL's staffing.
“The average nightclub on Robson Street probably has more bouncers than the Registrar of Lobbyists has compliance officers.”
He said he's concerned about the ORL's reliance on voluntary compliance.
“People who hire lobbyists are obviously there to protect and promote their special interests; they're not going to be people who will be cajoled nicely into reporting the information that ordinary British Columbians and MLAs have a right to know.”
Travis said he'd like to see politicians help with identifying lobbyists by reporting who they meet with, on a quarterly basis.
Travis added that B.C.'s transparency requirements fall well short of what's imposed at a federal level.
“I'm registered as a federal lobbyist, and boy would I love to have this as the regime that I would have to operate under,” he said. “This is giving lobbyists a blank cheque in terms of how they carry out their business.”
The ORL's annual report noted plans to develop a code of conduct for lobbyists in B.C.: “Although a mechanism exists to censure public office holders for unethical behaviour, no equivalent mechanism exists to censure lobbyists for corresponding unethical behaviour.”
The report noted that the Criminal Code and the Member's Conflict of Interest Act prohibits public office holders from improperly disclosing confidential information, accepting cash and gifts of value or operating in a conflict-of-interest position.
“However,” it pointed out, “there is little to prohibit lobbyists from, for example, soliciting, receiving and using confidential insider information, attempting to influence by providing gifts or other benefits and attempting an outcome that could put public office holder in a potential conflict of interest position.” •
