The B.C. government is set to loosen a law that requires lobbyists to report how they are attempting to influence elected officials.
The Lobbyists Transparency Act requires those engaged in lobbying to register their activities and report how they intend to influence government decision-making.
Last April, the B.C. government passed amendments to weaken those requirements in a move the Ministry of the Attorney General says will benefit smaller organizations, like non-profits.
The changes, which will come into force at the end of May, remove requirements to report requests for government funding. They also reduce the frequency — from monthly reports to once every three months — registered lobbyists need to disclose how much money they ultimately receive.
“These amendments aren’t intended to reduce transparency,” a ministry spokesperson told BIV in an email.
“They are targeted changes to ease the out-sized reporting burden that many non-profits and smaller organizations told us they were feeling.”
Despite the government’s stated intentions, the amendments will apply to all lobbyists, including consultants, the spokesperson confirmed.
Duff Conacher, who co-founded the group Democracy Watch and reviewed changes to B.C.’s lobbying laws, said many of the amendments make sense and attempt to reduce paperwork that doesn’t reveal anything new.
“You don’t need this stuff. It’s not really going to remove any details,” he said.
But that’s not the case when it comes to a lobbyist asking government officials for money. Those details will now remain obscured and only revealed later if money is paid out, Conacher said.
“That’s reducing transparency,” he said. “That’s obviously not a small thing to be lobbying about.”
Amendments make tracking favours harder, says expert
To understand how the amendments could increase government secrecy, Conacher said you have to consider how the lobbyist act interacts with other transparency laws.
B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) allows individuals, businesses, reporters, non-profits and political parties to access government records that would otherwise be obscured.
But the law does not release records that show why a government may have made a decision, and deliberations of cabinet — the highest level of provincial government — are exempted from freedom of information requests.
That’s where the lobbyist registry is meant to fill a void in the public’s right to know who is influencing and perhaps motivating the decisions of elected officials.
When under the current laws a lobbyist discloses a request for money, the company, organization or individual can be cross-referenced with disclosures showing political donations. While far from perfect, the constellation of so-called “sunshine laws” offers a window into potential cases of corruption, said Conacher.
The latest amendments to the lobbyist act close that window and represent a “step backward” for government transparency in B.C., he said.
“If you’re trying to track trading of favours, then knowing a company has requested money from a government matters,” Conacher said. “It’s already a sad joke. This latest change just makes it worse.”
Big transparency loopholes remain open despite pressure
Pressure to reform government transparency laws across Canada has been mounting for more than a decade. But when governments have responded, it’s often been in the wrong direction, said Conacher.
In 2012, the House Ethics Committee recommended several changes to Canada’s Lobbying Act. The act was supposed to be reviewed in 2017, but several loopholes in the lobbyist registry remain open.
These include carve-outs that allow employees to lobby government for up to 20 per cent of their work time without reporting the activity.
“You can do a lot of lobbying in one day a week. It obscures. It hides,” Conacher said.
At the provincial level, big loopholes in lobbying laws persist across multiple jurisdictions.
One loophole in B.C. involves unpaid lobbying, which currently goes unreported. That means a former minister could pick up the phone and place an influential call to a former colleague while being paid for “strategic advice” as opposed to lobbying, said Conacher.
B.C.’s lobbying act also allows businesses to petition the government over the enforcement of an existing law without reporting the activity. In theory, that opens the door for companies to quietly ask the government to carry out less regulatory oversight or ask for warnings so they can clean up operations ahead of an inspection, Conacher said.
Reporting lobbying activities is also not required if the initial request for communication is made by an elected official.
And in a fourth exception to B.C.’s Lobbyists Transparency Act: Small businesses and non-profits with fewer than six employees — including many industry associations — can lobby without registering, as long as they have lobbied for less than 50 hours in the preceding 12 months.
“The law should not be called transparency. It should be called ‘the guide to how to lobby secretly,” said Conacher.
Transparency laws ensure government doesn't have free hand to manipulate information, says expert
Sean Holman is an associate professor at the University of Victoria and a former investigative journalist whose past reporting helped spur B.C. to reform government and corporate secrecy laws.
He said evidence-based democracies are premised on the idea that information is power. That’s because with information, you can make informed choices, which in turn help to control the excesses of government and powerful corporations.
“That is the premise that underpins our system of government and underpins the need for these laws,” Holman said.
Without transparency laws, governments have discretionary power over information, allowing them to pick and choose when, how and what information is released, and what remains out of public view.
That empowers elected officials to interpret facts to suit their own goals and manipulate the public narrative, Holman said.
“By obscuring certain kinds of lobbying, we are impacting that ‘why’ — why is government doing what it’s doing?” he said.
“And that is the most important question.”
Lobbying law weakened after government erects barriers to record requests
Holman pointed to changes to B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Privacy Laws that, among other things, introduced in 2021 a $10 application fee to access records under a general request.
Many reporters have since found that $10 cost can balloon to hundreds of dollars as the government stacks fees for requests made to multiple ministries. Additional fees can raise the cost of disclosures into the thousands of dollars if they include large volumes of records or require consultation with third parties. Civil servants may also choose to waive the levies if they determine it’s in the public interest.
In January 2024, B.C.’s independent Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner released a three-year review looking at government response times and the impact the fee had on freedom of information requests.
Despite the $10 fee, by 2023, average response times were found to have crept up to a 13-year-high of 85 days.
In 5,100 cases, the government was found to have exceeded the time to respond to a request without legal authority. The delays were found to impact political parties and news media the most.
Meanwhile, the report found freedom of information records request dropped by 50 per cent since the fee was introduced.
“Combined with findings on government’s timeliness during this period, it is clear the imposition of the application fee has not yielded quicker responses for applicants,” the commissioner concluded.
Weak lobbying transparency laws worry Canadians
The Canadian public also appears to be concerned about the impact of undisclosed lobbying.
Earlier this month, a national poll commissioned by Democracy Watch found a majority of respondents were concerned about the impacts of unethical lobbying.
Of the more than 1,077 respondents, 87 per cent said knowing who lobbied a politician and how they did is important when deciding what government policy to back and who to vote for.
The same share of respondents said it’s important to know whether a lobbyist has been given an exemption that allows them to give a valuable gift to a politician.
Despite public sentiment backing stronger transparency laws, many governments, including B.C., are moving in the other direction, said Conacher.
BC NDP Minister of Citizen Services George Chow told The Tyee last year he has no intention of removing the $10 freedom of information access fee.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Citizens’ Services said in an email it was monitoring the fee but that it was in line with those charged in other jurisdictions.
“We’ve increased proactive disclosures by 88 per cent and added seven additional categories, including some of the most frequently requested records, such as minister expenses and briefing materials,” read the statement.
The spokesperson did not say whether the ministry was considering removing the fee, instead saying it would “continue monitoring” the FOI system to ensure it meets the needs of British Columbians.
According to Holman, the FOI fee represents a “regressive” move and makes the latest weakening of the Lobbyists Transparency Act “highly suspect.”
“We’re in an era where the primary dividing line in politics is — do you believe the evidence or do you not?” he said. “Evidence is mattering less.
“That’s the problem. And that is undoing the very foundation for democracy.”
